Data managment is essentail for any professional who using a computer to conduct their work. this starts with the UPS and the PSU selection runs through every part of the computer system as this is essentail to safe guarding the computers data.
Ensuring that your computer will not lose data is not a simple task as there are many parts that could fail at any time. Most people have some sort of back up system where they will burn data to a disc and that is that, but what they dont have is some system inplace for when the power goes out, this cuts teh computer in mid stride and thus the data is lost in the current workflow. To avoid this an Uniterupted power supply is required, these are known as UPS and they help in many other ways to keep your data safe.
Arrays or should I say RAID +1 is often selected as a old form of data intergraty, its not essentally a back up system and runs a lot of risk. RAID +1 copies data from one disc to another, this means that viruses can also be transfered or the problem that causes the failure in the primary disc. thus you are no better off in fact you are wasting the space that could be used for spcific backups.
Your data should be trainsfered to a computer disc, a copy made and used for working on. the finished product of your work should then be put on another disc and backed up.
The RAW and finished data should then be exertnally backed up to ensure that the data is safe. Humans are forgetful and often as the cause to losing the data, automating the management of the data is key to keeping your data safe. Often we have heard many in hindsite of data loss, state that 'they could have', 'normaly they do', 'they should have'. all these reasons are human errors that result in lost work/data.
This is a typical safe way to keep your data safe:
A UPS computer so it will not cut out with the power.
transfer data to the computer, make a copy of the data to another disc for editing and working on.
Make a copy of the RAW data onto a external disc
Work on the copy that was made and save the work carried out on to another disc.
Copy the finsihed work onto another external disc, and burn a copy.
Effectively this gives you five copies of your data should you lose your finsihed work, you can alway rebuild from the raw data if the primary and secondary back ups fail. after such time, you can then deleted the backs when you have finished with the work and you do not need it on the main computer, there are copies on the array or other external media. thus after a set time you are left with two copies or one.
At Psy4 Computer systems we offer arrays for network back up, NAS (Network Aware Storage) drives and a host of options for data backup. For online backup click here. For Storage arrays see our product list page. For business solutions please see the GTWCMT business pages
