For most small and medium sized businesses, electronic data has become critical to the company's survival. Yet many companies do not backup their data on a regular basis.

Traditionally, larger firms have used digital tape backups, such as DLT or DDS. These solutions often require additional hardware installed in the server, and therefore tend to be too expensive for our clients.

We have developed a redundant, cost effective method for backup using regular desktop hard drives in external enclosures. Hard drives have become so affordable that our solution usually costs less than $360.00, depending upon storage requirements.

We recommend purchasing three hard drives and alternating them daily. This ensures that at least one disk is offsite at all times. Having one's data backups offsite is an important part of Disaster Recovery Planning.

We configure a full data backup (not incremental) that runs automatically every night. Since the data transfer rate on external hard drives is so fast, incremental backups are not necessary. In addition, we usually retain two previous backups on each drive, so at any time the client has nine full backups.

This backup routine has worked well for our clients. We test the hard drives at regular intervals, and replace them after one or two years of service.