I have not posted on this subject for a while, largely because I have found other subjects to post on instead. This is a mini-return on the subject of backups for the consultant.
Here is where you want to make use of a combination of tools, based on the single most important point – your laptop will die or go on a very long journey without you. This is where you begin to understand that you have lost all of your information that you have collected in the duration of your work. This can be limiting – both from the loss and the security of the data that has been lost, as many a civil and crown servant has found in recent days.Firstly you should have made great use of disk based encryptions such as Truecrypt, PGP, or Bitlocker to ensure that there is a good level of protection to the files that you hold, normally with information from your customers. You should conform to the information security requirements of your customer, exceed them or meet generally accepted levels.
Secondly, you need to make sure that you have access to a remote backup solution for the data, that has an encrypted link between you and the service, and that this backup is a constant backup that will work as you work. You can make use of online backup services such Carbonite, or a mechanism for synchronising your data back to home base such as Microsoft’s Foldershare. The important point is that you should protect all of your data (not your PC as such), all of the time. You do not plan when your laptop will die.
Thirdly (and this is belt and braces stuff), you also want to make sure of multiple external disks for backups that stay in multiple locations. The most important is one back at secure base, and the other is one off-site to where you work for your customer and your home site. These backups should be made with good backup software such as one that came with the external disk, Syncbackup or even Microsoft’s SyncToy.This allows the recovery back to a known date., which can combine with the online backup to ensure you have all your relevant data. External 2.5″ HD disks linked to your PC using USB2.0 are very lost today, 250GB for less than £100 is available today.
Fourth (and finally), ensure that you have a backup laptop that can quickly be used to get you back and working, and this would act as a target for the restore of your files. The important thing about this is that it must be available to you immediately and be easy to have configured. It is your choice whether this is directly available (by having one back at base) or indirectly available (it is easily available via a high street store such as PC World). Remember how much your time is worth when it is being sold to a customer – a few hundred pounds for a laptop is small in comparison to this – especially today and when you concentrate on functional laptops rather than fancy high value ones.
Hopefully it will not be as long a gap for the next post on this subject, as I have to cover application level solutions to communication and network problems as promised in my last ‘Consulting’ post.
