Importance of Solid Backup Strategy

If you think you've done some major muck-ups in your day, imagine the shock a technician at Alaska's Department of Revenue got when he realized he had deleted all applicant information for an oil-funded account. Of course they surely have backups of such data you say. Well, he accidentally formatted the backup drive as well. Shouldn't be a problem. They must have a tape backup stored somewhere. They did, but the tape was corrupted. The only backup was boxes on boxes of hard-copy application forms. This mistake cost the department $200,000 to input all the data again. Read the full story here. Lessons to be learned: Don't format. The technician who did this probably had a valid reason to do it, but I can't figure out why so many people still want to format their HDD just to fix a simple problem. As a rule of thumb, unless you're upgrading to a new OS, or a situation (such as a partition change) makes it absolutely necessary for you to reformat, don't do it. Consider the implications:

• You will have to install all the service packs over again. And if you use the internet to do this, there is a high chance that your PC might get infected before you complete the updates. It's not only Windows service packs I'm talking about. Almost every major application on your PC would need to be patched from the beginning.
• You lose all your personal settings. You can restore you're documents from your backup, but from what I've seen most people forget to backup their bookmarks, email accounts, stored passwords, and other personal settings.
• You need to re-install all your applications, some of which will require you to re-activate the product. Depending on the application, it might prevent you from re-activating. Then you have to get on the phone with the elusive support department.

You can avoid a format by simply defragmenting, running virus/spyware scans, and performing maintenance on your Windows registry. Regularly Test Backups Most of us don't give this much thought unless it really happens. Being prepared is a true mark of a professional. Setup a schedule to regularly check if your backups work.