• Backing Up Your Computer (Your Number 1 Priority)

You are the owner or manager of a retail store or restaurant. You come into your store on Monday and the computers are missing. You were robbed.

You are a student and just completed your history term paper. You turn on your printer and a power surge fries your computer. It won't turn on.

You have over 2,500 baby pictures of your newly born child (now 3 months old). You boot your computer and get a blue screen.

You spent three weeks getting your checkbook up to date, turn on your computer and get a virus notification. You can no longer get to your checkbook.

You illegally downloaded over 10,000 songs from Lime Wire and your computer hard drive no longer spins.

No matter what you use your computer for, just imagine what will be lost should your computer be gone (lost, stolen, fried, or just plain broken). You have just lost all of your important data, files, photos, music or whatever else you may have stored on your computer.

Backing up your computer is YOUR responsibility. If you are the owner or manager of a store, you need to know how your computer gets backed up. You also need a written plan to get your business up and running due to the loss of one or more of your computers via computer failure or theft.

Understand, a broken or stolen computer can be replaced. The inventory, other data, photos, music, and other lost items can never be replaced. That's why, you need to make sure you backup all of your data.

The way you back up your data depends on the importance of the data.

If you own or manage a retail store, you may want to backup your data on a daily basis. Should you lose your data, you will only be losing one day's worth of data which may not be catastrophic.

On the other hand, if you are a stock broker or run a bank, the loss of even one customer's data could be catastrophic.

If you are a student, the loss of a term paper due tomorrow could also be catastrophic and the difference between passing and failing a course.

• Backing Up With RAID

RAID is one method of backing up your data.

RAID or redundant array of independent disks continuously backs up your computers and data.

All banks use it. All stock brokers use it. Large retail stores use it. Very few smaller businesses use RAID.

RAID continuously backs up your server computer to a second redundant computer. Should your first computer fail, your second computer can instantly take over all of your business functions. Theoretically, you can recover from a computer failure automatically and without user intervention. Should a RAID hard drive fail, you can remove it from your RAID computer, stick in a replacement hard drive, and your two hard drives or computers will instantly synchronize.

A RAID backup is a great thing to have. Upgrading your present business system to a RAID system will cost you about $1,500 to $3,000 (including a redundant computer, extra hard drive, and installation by a knowledgeable computer person). The $1,500 to $3,000 is just a quick estimate. It depends on your business needs and requirements.

RAID sounds great, but is not perfect. Should your computers get stolen from your business, both computers would probably be gone. Should one of your employees use Lime Wire or download some photos from a site that adds a virus to your computer, both computers will now be infected and neither computer will run correctly (although your data would probably still be safe).

How do we return a computer to a time when it was working properly?

• Returning Your Computer To A Time When It Was Working Properly

Maybe  you decided to pay $1,500 to $3,000 for a redundant RAID computer as discussed above or maybe you didn't.

Here's a less expensive solution that everyone should use.

Acronis makes a program called True Image Home 2010. This program makes an image of everything on your hard drive and saves it on an external hard drive. The software sells for $49.95. An external USB Hard Drive costs about $99.

I make an image copy of my hard drive once per month. This image contains all of my music, photos, spreadsheets, term papers and other data,  and all of my software programs such as Windows, Cash Register Express, Microsoft Word.

Should my computer fail, or should my hard drive fail, or should my computer be taken over by a virus or spyware, I can go back in time and restore my entire computer to a previous point in time.

Since I make an image copy of my computer on a monthly basic, I can go back in time to a period where my computer was working perfectly.

Read more about Acronis True Image Home 2010 and other more sophisticated Acronis products at:

http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/

Acronis can return your computer to a previously working time, but what about your most recent data?

• SyncToy Backs Up Your Data Whenever You Want

So now you are using or not using RAID to give you a redundant computer. You are using Acronis

to back up your computer every month, but what happens to your most recent data.

SyncToy is a FREE program from Microsoft. It is outstanding. SyncToy can back up your data every time you run the program. Or using the Scheduler that comes with your computer, you can have SyncToy back up your computer at scheduled periods of time (for example, 3 AM every morning).

Unfortunately, although SyncToy is FREE and pretty easy to use, you may need a more experienced computer user to set it up for you. If you don't use SyncToy, you still need to figure out how to backup your important files on a daily basis.

SyncToy (or equivalent) will backup and synchronize all of your important music, spreadsheets, photos, business and other data. It will send this backup to an external USB Hard Drive attached to your computer or to any other hard drive located on your network.

...or, you can also use Acronis True Image in the above paragraph. Acronis does a complete image of your hard drive. It can also backup and synchronize individual files.

For more information about SyncToy go to:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=c26efa36-98e0-4ee9-a7c5-98d0592d8c52&displaylang=en

• Buy A Flash Drive for Quick File Backups

Staples and others are selling 4 GB Flash Drives for $9.99. 4 GBs is a lot of room. These Flash Drives used to sell for more than $300. They fit in your pocket, can easily be plugged into the USB port of your computer, and can have enough room to store all of your Cash Register Express or Restaurant Pro Express data along with hundreds of photos, music file, term papers and other data.

As a student, you should probably make a back up of your term paper each time you revise it. Make one copy on your computer or laptop. Make another copy on your flash drive. Make sure you update your work at least once per hour.

Under $10 and you can take home your latest computer data each and every night.

• Use Mozy To Backup Your Computer Data Online

$54.95 per year will get you unlimited data storage on Mozy.com. You can backup all of your computer data to an external location. Should your computer be lost or stolen, Mozy has all of your data at some external location where it can be recovered.

You can set up Mozy to work in the middle of the night (let's say 3 AM in the morning). Mozy will backup all the changed data in your system including inventory, spreadsheets, word processor documents, photos, music and anything else you need to back up.

You can use Mozy for free if you have less than 2 GBs of information that you need to back up.

See more about Mozy at:

http://mozy.com/home/pricing/

• Backing Up Cash Register Express and Restaurant Pro Express

pcAmerica has an excellent tutorial to help you backup your Cash Register Express and Restaurant Pro Express data onto a flash drive or other external USB device.

You are the boss or the manager. You need to make sure that you have a backup.

Go here:

http://faq.pcamerica.com/

Click on Software

Click on CRE/RPE Maintenance

Click on Backing Up Your Database

...or just click on the link or button below

http://5054008060768789784-a-pcamerica-com-s-sites.googlegroups.com/a/pcamerica.com/support/file-lockers/pdf-locker/Backup_Database_CRE_RPE_to_CD_USB.pdf?attachauth=ANoY7co2Yd8EGOTwLLNg5Pd-cE2FGGFscrqIwNrp29V1mgcPjfYk-C7Qc4UkAf6j7prZb-rM7yWJb3YDj06rKS6mBz