By Roger Gooden

If you ask anyone who has lost all their data if they would have preferred “a kick in the head” instead, most would take the kick. Why? For most offices, losing all the information on your computer can be devastating.

Imagine if your office floods, there is a fire, or a theft. Your computer is water logged, melted, or simply gone. Can your office survive this? Have you prepared your office to handle this type of disaster?

Most offices today rely on their computers to perform almost all office tasks. From billing and scheduling to patient documentation, you depend on your computers to run your office. The loss of that information can cripple an office or simply shut them down.

There are also cases where the billing machine has been stolen and the backups were on the stolen machine, or computers were destroyed by lightning and no backups exist.

Then there are those offices that thought they were backing up every night onto CD only to find out when they needed to restore, there was nothing on them … ever.

There are various different backup strategies to help mitigate your potential loss, but the real question is how much risk you are willing to take. Can you live with having to re-enter one day’s information, one week’s information, or one month’s information?

What is a computer backup?

A backup is computer terminology for creating a copy of data for the use in restoration if a computer becomes corrupt or no longer useable.

There are several different ways to accomplish this in order to make sure your data is secure at all times. Creating a backup now will save you a larger headache later in terms of having to re-create data by trying to re-input things you lost.

Remember a backup is only a copy of the data and not a copy of the entire computer system. Most software packages will have a backup function built in. Make sure to backup per the manufacturers specifications.

Automatic vs. manual backups

Manual backups can be done at any time, but require you to be present to begin the backup and choose which documents, applications, or files to backup. Automatic backups allow you to choose the documents, applications, and files to backup and when these backup should occur.

This type of backup can be done while away from the office, either at lunchtime or overnight. Backup software is usually required to be installed on the computer in order for the automatic backups to occur. You can also use the operating system’s task scheduler to assist you in creating automatic backups of data if the software has a way to assist in this task.

Where do I backup to?

Backups can be placed on several different types of storage media including memory sticks, external hard drives, recordable CDs, and online backup sites.

Memory sticks, flash drives, or thumb drives, as they are also known as, plug directly into a USB drive on your computer and from there you can place data on the memory stick. Data can be deleted, moved, and placed on a memory stick at will.

An external hard drive is similar to the hard drive already inside the computer; however, it lies outside the computer and plugs directly into a USB or firewire drive. This hard drive is much larger than a memory stick and therefore can hold much more data. Like the memory stick, it can be plugged into several computers and save data from those computers. It can also be used to restore data from several computers; data can be deleted, moved, and placed on a hard drive at will.

Recordable CDs can be placed into a computer’s CD drive and if it has burning capabilities, data can be saved onto the CD. Once the data is saved, it cannot be altered or changed, but can be moved to another computer at any time.

Online backup sites require your computer to have an Internet connection and a