Save your precious business data

by: Lance Chambers

We all know how critical our business information can be and that's why we are told time and again to backup our data. But, let's be honest, how many of us ever do? I have a very strong suspicion that only a minority of us backup regularly if at all and when the day comes, as it will, and we lose all our data we are devastated and sometimes find ourselves in a really untenable position vis-a-vis our business. The traditional backup procedures can be expensive. Using RAID systems means having a number of other disks to backup just one disk (expensive), saving data off-line (eg on tape) is time consuming and can be expensive, backup over the internet (possible for small data sets but don't try it with large ones as the time and cost can become prohibitive) or you need DVDs or stacks of CDs - all requiring money and often time that you might not have. But there is a piece of software that, to some degree, can save us the trouble of backing up our data all the time. Hard disk drive these days come with some very clever software on-board called SMART (Self-Monitoring And Reporting Technologies) that is capable of predicting a hard disk failure. Using software that can interrogate the SMART condition of your drive/s it is possible to find out if your drive/s are close to failure and it's getting close to the time to replace them with something newer. Replacing your old hard drives with newer ones is one of the better strategies to ensuring data integrity - there are other techniques as well but this is a good, cheap alternative. One of the easiest pieces of software to use is called Speedfan. It will actually do more than check your hard drives. It will also allow you to overclock your computer (at your own risk), do a temperature check on the CPU and hard drives and will allow you to check and change the speeds of  your computers fans. The great thing about this is that you can make the fans speed up as the CPU gets hotter and slow down if it gets cooler ensuring that an optimum temperature is maintained. A great piece of freeware! NOTE: Be aware that checking your disks for deterioration does NOT guarantee that you are safe from a hard disk crash and subsequent data loss - it just lessens the possibility.