TechTips01-backups

Tech Tip 01

System Backups Made Easy - A Time Saving Exercise in Production Security

As productive and necessary as computers are in today’s work environment, it is amazing how often they “whig-out” for one reason or another. The reasons for this may vary, but the result is usually the same, i.e. a production system is down, and needs to be restored to health.

One temptation, when a system suddenly stops working is to ask the question “why?” And while this may be a good question, it doesn’t always address the critical issue, which is getting the system back in production asap.

When we receive these types of phone calls for support, a first question we have is usually, “do you have a backup?” And you might be amazed at how often the answer is “no”.

So today’s tech tip is focused on backups, or more precisely system disk cloning. For less than $100 per workstation (the cost of an external USB disk drive), it is possible to have a disk (or disk image) that is an exact clone of your internal computer hard disk drive, that can be used to boot (or restore) from and will have all of the files and applications you work with every day. It will be as current as the last backup, and can save hours of time rebuilding a system, and installing applications, in the event of a disk failure. And what is even better, the software to accomplish this is FREE! One of the best utilities available is Carbon Copy Cloner from Bombich Software, linked here.

http://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html

Carbon Copy Cloner is actually “Donation-Ware”, meaning that you can use it free, and if you like it, you are asked to donate a small amount for the ongoing support of the effort. CCC allows you to create a clone of your hard disk drive to another drive, or to a “disk image” file. Either one can be used to restore your hard drive to its original state at the time of the clone, but only the hard drive option gives you a spare boot drive, should your disk crash, or should you need to boot from an entirely different computer.

So, for that critical workstation or server, ask yourself how much time it would take to reload all of the software, re-enter the activation keys (if you can find them) and regenerate all of the configurations in order to get back into production. If you are like most of us, this is a lot more time than simply plugging in a usb drive and rebooting.

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