April 30, 2008

Is Your Backup Comprised Of Image Backups or only File Backups? Better Be Safe than Sorry.

Many of us have been drilled and drilled on the importance of backup. We backup files religiously to external hard disks, CD-ROM or DVD or use online services such as Carbonite, HP's Upline, Dell's Online backup solution, Backupmyinfo or one of many other offerings.

Beyond file backup, which is important for recovering lost files, having an updated image of your computer's hard disk (especially you server) is also important.

Acronis makes a variety of software that not only backs up your files but also creates an image of your computer system.

For a server environment, wherein it might not be feasible to shut down the computer you want to be able to create an image of a file while the server is running.

With Acronis' True Image Echo users can create an exact duplicate image of the live disk drives on servers or workstations, including the operating system, all configuration files, programs, updates, databases and data. The image can be saved to internal or external disk drives (including USB 2.0 and FireWire), networked drives (NAS, SAN), RAID controllers, writable CD or DVD, SCSI tape drives, or even FTP servers. The ability to create transportable images that can be restored universally to dissimilar hardware is also possible through Acronis Universal Restore. The image can be used for any number of purposes, including disaster recovery, data backup, disk cloning, and migration to virtual machine environments.

Doing this kind of backup (image and files) is not something you should do on your own but you should definitely ask your local technology consultant about your backup strategy.

If your entire server goes down or the hard disk crashes on your CFO's computer - how fast and how complete can the data be resurrected. With imaging and file backup - 100% recovery is doable.

tags: acronis , backup , security | 0 comments