Back-up policies and procedures

Back-up needs to be appropriate for the way you work, and ideally you want a system that allows you to take the back-up data off-site for storage, in case your office is burgled or has a fire.

How to back-up

You could copy new files on to a floppy disk at the end of every day and take them home with you, although floppy disks are considered fairly unreliable and prone to breaking, which means you may need a back-up of your back-up.

If you have a CD writer you could burn your files on to a CD. Even better is using a rewritable CD, which you can use many times to keep the expense down. If you do not have a CD writer then consider buying a USB key.They come in different data storage sizes and work like a reliable floppy disk. A 2Gb memory stick can cost as little as £11 and is a great way storing copies of a large number of folders and documents.

If you are lucky enough to work in an organisation that has a network and a network administrator, you may find that back-up is sorted out for you, so it is always worth asking and being clear about your role in this.

You may also think about using an online back-up service, which can use your broadband connection to automatically send valuable information off to another location on the net.This is still a relatively expensive option and probably of more use to larger organisations with bigger budgets. In the future, however, this is likely to become an increasingly common way to safeguard information.

What to back-up?

Backing up everything on your computers means that if your computer crashes you can go back to your last back-up and reinstall the operating system, your applications, each user’s preferences, passwords, individual settings and the documents in the folders.

Or you could back-up only the files that you have created, such as your database records, word processing and spreadsheet files, or your email. This can save time when backing up but it means that if you have a problem you may need to completely reinstall your operating system and applications from the CDs they came on.

When to back-up?

Several factors will influence how frequently you want to run a back-up:

• The type of back-up you’re using: burning your files to a new CD every day will take too long to be practical but backing up over a network may be quick enough to be able to run every night.
• The amount of information you want to back-up: one or two people producing letters and updating spreadsheets can afford to run back-up once a week.A team of 30 will probably produce enough new information every day to make it worth backing up daily.
• Using an automated service: all back-up software should let you automate the backing-up process, so you decide when it will back up, what it will back up and where to. This reduces the administration, so you can do it more frequently.
• Costs: if you decide to pay for back-up services you usually pay according to the amount of data you back up, or how frequently.
• You may run a full system back-up less frequently than backing up the documents you’re working on; for example, staff could copy their current work files to a USB stick at the end of every day and take them home.

What back-up is built in?

Windows XP has a back-up utility which can be used in different ways to save the information on the disk to a choice of places. Use the Start Menu > All Programs > Accessories > SystemTools > Back-up

Back-up tools are not built into a Mac. You must either pay about £50 to get a .Mac account for the officialApple back-up software or use one of the cheap back-up programs available for about £20 – try www.download.com for current options. Back-up is built into the next version of Mac OSX, which was due out in 2007.

There are various Open Source back-up tools available and the version of Linux you are running – such as Ubuntu – will dictate your options.