Software You Can Count OnDaily backup made simple
The success of any storage facility depends on the day to day reliability of its account data and financial information. We all recognize the risk of such undesirable incidents as theft, fire, hardware failure or malware infection. Incidents such as these can set a facility back by weeks or worse. The impact is compounded when your data is lost forever. Taking time to plan a sound data backup strategy is the critical step to protecting your business from data loss.
As most of our clients are aware, DOMICO Software backs up at the beginning of every Close Day. By default, the backup is saved to the local hard disk, but this is not a safe backup solution. The local hard disk is internal media. To backup safely, you must save your data to external media. DOMICO has always recommended that managers store daily backups in a secure location out of office.
There are hundreds of ways to meet this recommendation, from external hard disks, to web-based backup services, to centralized corporate servers. For DOMICO clients, rewritable CDs were the backup media of choice for many years, but even this simple solution requires ROXIO or equivalent media software. As any IT professional can tell you, the more complicated the backup strategy, the less likely it will be put to use.
The recent cheapness and abundance of USB Flash Drives means an external backup has never been simpler:
- Ease of use: plug it into your computer; Windows and DOMICO Software will recognize it immediately as a writable “disk”
- Small and therefore easy for managers to take off-site, could even be linked to a keyring
- Durable — no moving parts like with conventional disks, doesn’t scratch like a CD
- 8 GB for about $10 and falling as of this writing — purchase one for each day of the week. DOMICO recommends at least 1 GB drive size
If security is a concern, some USB flash devices offer encryption and biometric fingerprinting.
How to backup DOMICO Software to a USB Flash Drive
You can plug your flash drive into any USB port on your computer. Windows will recognize it as a drive, and will give it the next drive letter available. The drive can be viewed like any other in the My Computer menu (known as the Computer menu in Windows Vista). In this example, the drive letter is H:
DOMICO Software can now access this drive. To configure daily backup for the H: drive, open the Tools menu and select Backup and Restore:
Backup To: will show your current backup destination. If you are backing up to CD this field will show d:, if you are backing up to your local hard disk this field will show c:.
Select your new drive letter from the Backup To: drop-down list:
You may now click Backup to backup your current data to your flash drive, or you can simply click Ok to save settings — DOMICO will backup to your disk at the beginning of your next Close Day. It’s that easy!
Things to remember:
- Plug in your flash drive before running Close Day … if you forget, Close Day will finish successfully, but you will not have an external backup for that day
- Eject your flash drive when Close Day is finished … there is no point in backing up to external media only to leave it plugged into your PC!
- Eject properly … Windows XP and Vista will display an icon representing your flash drive in the system tray, by the PC clock. You can right click this icon to Safely Remove Hardware before pulling the flash drive out of the USB port.
Procedures may vary by brand — always consult the documentation that come with your flash drives. - These little drives can hold a lot of data, but they will still fill up eventually. Check the contents of the drive once a month, removing old files that are no longer needed. Drive contents can be viewed under My Computer -> Removable (H:), drive letter will vary.
- Be wary of multiple drives! You don’t want your business data to get mixed up in your personal files. If you use flash drives for other purposes, eject these before running Close Day. Find a way to label the drives to avoid confusion — since many flash drives are designed as key chains, you can label them the same way you would a set of keys on a keyring.
- If you are not aware of your current backup strategy, consult your system administrator before making any system changes