Balmori Software Inc.

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Photo: Markus Spiske

Why should I back up my data?
You want to back up your data because you need to have a spare copy if and when these files become corrupted. There are many ways your data can be corrupted; and the sheer number of possible causes helps make data corruption more difficult to predict or prevent. Suffice it to say that when you suffer data corruption, you experience expensive downtime. You or your department or your entire company shall be at least temporarily unable to render an important service or services.

That will cost you in many ways, most so obvious as to require no elaboration. Furthermore, re-encoding lost or corrupted data is time consuming and expensive. Think of the per-hour salaries of the people who will do the re-encoding. (After two or three months of using a Balmori Software application, your data, even when measured by the narrow criterion of data-encoder wages alone, is probably already worth a lot more than what you paid for the original application package.)

What is a back up?
A back-up is (a) an extra copy of your files (b) in a medium physically separate from that in which your original data resides. Also, common sense and sound risk-management tell us that (c) back-up files should be stored in a separate geographical location, in order to provide a true fallback in case of fire, burglary, or sabotage at your primary location.

What data should I back up?
You should make an extra copy of any data files that are important to your ability to do your work. There is an entire continuum of degrees of "important," from mission-critical data to nice-to-have data. You decide what is important to back up.

From a practical standpoint, you will want to back up any data that, if lost for any reason, would be time-consuming to re-encode.

If you have a hard time distinguishing the important from the expendable, here's another way to approach the question: if you have the resources, the state of technology is such that you could actually back up your entire hard disk in one step. This spares you the effort of segregating the crucial from the possibly trivial. (See section below entitled "How do I back up my data?")

If you are using a Balmori Software application (for example, SURE! GL, SURE! ARAP, SURE! ALMMS, or SURE! PayMaster), you need to back up only those files with the extensions .NTD, .NTX, and .TXT.

Files with names ending in .NTD are data files which contain your encoded data. Files ending in .NTX are index files that rearrange your encoded data into the various reports that you use. TXTs are text files that you create whenever you print a report to file rather than to printer.

In fact, you do not need to remember those .NTDs, .NTXs, and .TXTs. All Balmori Software apps have a built-in back-up utility, and a matching data restore utility. And both are no-brainers to use: learning time is approximately 2 minutes, assuming you can read English.

How do I back up my data?
Do not be intimidated by the many available techniques and hardware options for backing up data. Focus on first principles; namely, a back-up is merely an extra copy of your files. The sophisticated techniques and hardware are there to make the process faster and more reliable, and to minimize the size of very large files.

But these are concerns for so called power users, such as IT department types. You may or may not be a power user. If you are not with your company's IT department, chances are you're not a power user, and you don't need all the fancy tools. Here are two down-to-earth techniques that don't require any expensive equipment or software:

1. Case 1: You have few specific files you want to back up; and they're not too voluminous. Simply copy the files that you want to back up onto a separate medium such as a flash drive, an external HDD, or an SSD. (Exactly how is this accomplished, step by step? a) Google is your friend; or b) call us for some old-fashioned, non-robot-based handholding.)

2. Case 2: You want to back up your entire hard disk. This approach assumes that you have a spare hard disk drive (HDD) or solid state drive (SSD) lying around. Connect the spare hard disk drive to your computer, and copy everything in your original drive onto the spare drive. You now have an exact copy - a back-up - of your entire HDD. Disconnect the back-up HDD from your PC, and bring it to a secure, separate, but easily accessible location, such as the boss's residence.

Or you could back up all your data to the cloud, which satisfies the remote-but-easily-acessible criterion (More about going to the cloud here.)

When and how often should I back up my data?
You are the best judge of when to back up and how often to back up. A prudent rule of thumb is once a week; but it is really the rate of new-data generation in your organization that will dictate the answer. A better way to answer this question is by answering a series of smaller questions:

How much data do I encode per day? Per hour? Per week? How difficult would it be to reconstruct (re-input) my data, were I to lose it?

Does your job generate 40 transactions a week? Then you might get away with backing up once a week. But if you generate 40 transactions a day, prudence dictates that you back up every day or two. And if you happen to generate 4,000 transactions a day, you'd be wise to back up twice a day, or even more frequently.

In the end, it all boils down to how much disruption you would suffer if you had to re-encode all the data generated since your most recent back-up. Obviously, the more frequently you back up your data, the less data you have to re-encode, the less overtime you have to pay, the shorter the downtime your business processes endure.

Causes of data corruption (and how to protect yourself)
(This is a related area of interest to someone studying backing-up concerns and techniques. However, we decided to deal with this topic in a separate article, because we judged including it here would make this article too long, thus diffusing the impact of both topics, or perhaps simply discouraging the reader with its sheer length. Here's a link to the full article "Causes of data corruption (and how to protect yourself)"

Conclusion
At this stage of the computer age, probably more than 50% of the information critical to the success of your organization is in your computer hard disk drives. If this is true in your case, then your survival as an enterprise depends on your securing all this important data. To ensure that a disastrous failure of your computer resources does not kill your busines, you must back up systematically, frequently, and regularly.

And you must ensure that the back-ups you do create are sound, and not themselves corrupted. Keep your eye on basic principles, rather than succumb to a fascination with fancy techniques or fancy equipment. A sophisticated tool that is complicated or difficult to use will cause you to back up less regularly than a simple, easy-to-understand tool or technique that you are confident using.
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