Backups

The purpose of a backup, safe copying , is to ensure that you do not lose any information if something happens to the files on your computer, such as a disk crash or accidentally deletion  or editing of files. Therefore should the backups not bee in the same building as you computer, but rather stored in a well-classed data center far from your company, and also with a high security to prevent unauthorized access of your files. It should also be stored in Sweden to get benefits of the strong Swedish laws for integrity, and guarantee not violate PLU (Personuppiftslagen/Personal Data Act). Backups is something that should be done automatically in the background, and should not significantly affect your computer, and if accident happened it should be easy to restore selected files from the past.

Backup should not be mixed up with synchronizations, that is often used for file shares and where the “copy” is always updated to the latest version. If a file get corrupt, or you accidentally overwrite it, then the synchronization will directly transfer that error to you copy.

Do you need to continuously back up everything on your computer? No, we at QBRITS do not think so; The computer disk containing roughly three things; 1. Operating System (Windows, OSX ….), 2. Applications (Word, Chrome, ……) and 3. all the files you have made (documents, invoices, photos ….).
The operating system does not change from when you bought the computer and the updates come via the web, so that does not need daily fresh backup. Same thing with the applications installed, they do not change after installation. Should the disk crash during the computer’s warranty then you likely will get a new disk with operativet pre-installed, it is an old computer, you will probably take the opportunity to buy a new when those are fairly cheap today, and in that case you can not use the operating system backup from your old computer when the those are very model specific.
It might be good to make a recovery-CD when you made major changes in the installation and others, to have  if the disk has crashed. How these are done variate between different PC manufacturers and operating systems, how to do is described for some of them in our help pages.

But the most important among these three is “Your Files”, that is; all you have done and saved. Here is important that you are taking backup of the location where you storing files, usually this is done in the folders My Documents, My Pictures and on the Desktop.

The following criteria can be specified for backup systems:

• Simple to use, since it is not very fun to realize that your settings were wrong when you need to restore, and the files are lost forever.
• Easy to do restore, and also just for test restore an old version of a file.
• Regularly provide reports that it works, because as it runs in the background  it is easy to miss if it has stopped.
• Must be run directly ( after changing file) because you can not assume that the computer is turned on at night, or directly after the computer is turned on after a missed backup cycle.
• Should be able to manage multiple versions of files, not just the recent.
• Should be able to manually start an extra backup.
• Should be stored in Sweden, in the protected data center, and with good encryption.
• Must run in the background and not take unnecessarily power/load from the computer.
• It is preferred that you can configure use of resources, otherwise it can slow down old computers and if using a slow internet connection.
• Must be possible to do pause on the backup, in case it is inappropriate time to do it (for example, a notebook via cell phone on a ski holiday in Alps).