McAfee Student Survival Kit 1.0, Getting Started

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Using Student Survival Kit
28 Student Survival Kit
Defining Your Backup Strategy
After you decide which backup type you want to use (either a protected
volume file or a directory backup set), the most important questions you must
answer when defining your own backup strategy are:
• Where will you store the backup set?
• What files are important (which files must be backed up)?
• How often should you or Safe & Sound make these backups?
Where Will You Store the Backup Set?
If the survival of your business depends upon your PC being up and running
at all times (and if money is not an object), the ultimate way to protect the data
on your PC would be to set up a redundant PC with identical sized drives. This
backup PC’s only job would be to mirror the data on your primary PC. It
would be waiting in the wings should your first PC fail for any reason. And if
that happened, you could simply switch your work to the second PC while the
first one is repaired.
Often money is a consideration in deciding where you’ll store your backup
sets. The least expensive way of making backups has traditionally been to
copy data to 3.5-inch disks, though this is the most labor intensive way of
storing backups because it requires you to switch disks by hand.
In today’s computer marketplace, you may discover that it is as cost effective
to acquire a separate backup hard drive where you can keep a current mirror
backup copy of one or more other drives that you use on your PC.
In addition, you may want the backup copy to be stored at a remote location,
for increased protection. As long as Safe & Sound can access a logical drive
mapped on your PC, it can store the backup set there. That is, the backup set
can be stored on a shared network drive.
NOTE: You can use the Map Network Drive command, available by
Right-clicking My Computer, to assign (map) a drive letter to a location
on a network drive. This makes that location a “logical drive” on your
PC. For more details, see your Windows online Help.
Even if you cannot invest in another drive or disks for storing your backups,
you can still create a backup copy of your data on the same drive. This offers
the least protection should that drive fail, but the potential for data recovery is
increased by having two sets of your most important information stored there.
It is further enhanced if you select the protected volume file backup type,
which allows recovery in many circumstances even with the drive physically
damaged.