Direct MP3 Download: Podnutz Episode 17: Backups and Disaster Preparation w/Mike Petro

• Mike Petro from Petro Computer Solutions is this week’s guest
• Methods of Storage
• Backup Software
• Cloning/Snapshot options

Show Notes:

– Mike Petro joins up from Petro Computer Solutions

– Decide what you need to backup

– Optical Backup – CD/DVD – CD’s store o ly 700MB, DVD’s can store up to 8GB. Optical storage media doesn’t last forever however.

– Redundancy is the key to backup prepararion

– External hard drives are great way to backup your info

– Flash/Thumb drive probably not the best way to back up your hard drive.

– On-site vs. Off-site backups: Your first off-site backup may take a while becasue of slow upload speed. On-site backups are faster are more lilable at to suffer same damage as original copy if located in same spot.

– JungleDisk or Carbonite good services for off-site backup.

– Mike’s backup plan for customers: Insatll external drive. Back it up every night, with weekly differential recovery using SyncbackSE from 2BrightSparks.com. Fridays -task scheduler burns CDs of data that is being backed up on external drive using CommandBurn.

– Cobian Backup great program for backups and is free.

– Difference between Full, Incremental, and Differential backups. See this page on the Acronis Resource Center for full explanation.

– Great method of backing up is cloning/imaging, because it creates an exact duplicate of your existing hard drive.

– Norton Ghost – Mike uses for cloning/imaging drives

– Acronis True Image – Steve uses for imaging, and is another great tool for backups, cloning, and any hard drive maintainance and manipulatipon.

– Mike’s cool car computer – pictures on the way…

– MP3car.com – greate site for car-puter enthusiasts.

– And Steve made a coffee table computer with this coffee table.

– Hard Drive Art

– Check the box to verify files after copying/burning/cloning.

– Great idea to upsell the customer with a backup service.

– Data recovery – when you delete a file it is still on the computer usually and can be recovered, until it is written over.

– ALWAYS use a different drive to perform the data recovery. If you use the existing drive, you may be writing over the files.

– PC Inspector is a free data recovery program that works ok. Steve uses Recover My Files with more success.

– Disaster recovery – services exist to recover data you cannot get back by normal means, like Datadoctors.com.