by Austin Vail

Created on: January 29, 2007   Last Updated: February 11, 2007

People are working from home offices more than ever before in this 21st century technical world. The lessons learned in corporate datacenters during the last twenty years of the last century are valuable to the home worker to ensure the highest level of availability, and thus productivity, for the employer. In turn, this high level of availability will make the employee a valued team member, whether a freelance contractor, working through a contracting outfit, or a regular employee.

The corporate datacenter of today implements three major availability principles to ensure 24x7x365-6 (24 hours a day by seven days a week by all year, every year) uptime, which is to say keep the systems running always. These are backup, UPS (Uninterrupted Power Supply), and hardware redundancy, which also includes RAID-1 and RAID-5, two disk drive schemes that can be done in either software or hardware.

Backup involves the copying of data from the primary spinning hard drive to some kind of backup medium, and the idea is to protect from data corruption, accidental loss of data and primary disk failure. Tape was used in the early days of computing, and in some situations still is, but for home use, USB (Universal Serial Bus) disk drives work better. Software of some brand and flavor needs to be installed for backing up, and while some commercial operating systems offer built-in backup, this author has found them to be unreliable, difficult to use, or both.

Never underestimate the importance of backups. If your livelihood depends on your data, that data needs protection, and backup provides it. Corporations have learned this lesson the hard way by losing critical data and even going out of business as a result.

A common practice is to take a full weekly backup, then incremental backups (only changed data) during the week. Here the idea is that if you backup corrupted data, which will also be corrupted upon restore, then you might be able to get the good data from the full weekly. Several weeklies might be done in case the corrupted data hasn't been noticed for a while.

Even with a USB drive protecting your data, there's still another risk that's called DR (Disaster Recovery) in corporate land. If you're serious about your career and thus your data, you will figure out how to do DR. The idea is to have another backup of your data stored somewhere physically distant (offsite) from your home office in order that you can recover in case of fire, flood, hurricane and so forth. Prior to the

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