Backup Criteria Essay

A company should have backup files of anything important and pertinent to their business. Any data and files that are stored on their computer should be backed up. I would suggest a full backup which includes all files whether they have been changed or not. I would have 8 datasets which includes User Acquisition Costs, Abandoned Carts, Visitor Value, Lifetime Value, Traffic, Lead Source ROI, Purchase Funnel and Percentage of Mobile Visits. I would use a File History back up. Before you start using File History to back up your files, you need to first select where your backups are saved. You can select an externally connected drive, such as a USB drive, or you can save to a drive on a network. There are other choices, but these two provide the best options to help protect your files against a crash or other PC problems. File History only backs up copies of files that are in the Documents, Music, Pictures, Videos, and Desktop folders and the OneDrive files available offline on your PC. If you have files or folders elsewhere that you want backed up, you can add them to one of these folders. The data should be taken offsite every night. Data backup is extremely critical to the survival of your business. There are numerous potential hazards that threaten your data. Equipment failures, crashes, theft, fire and flood are just a few examples of the dangers. Your company needs a solid plan in place to assure that all of your important data is retrievable. If a crash occurs, you can such utilities as fdisk, dinit, chkfsys, and spatch to detect and repair any damage that happened to files that were open for writing at the time of the crash. In many cases, you can completely restore the filesystem. Sometimes the damage may be more severe. For example, it’s possible that a hard disk will develop a bad block in the middle of a file, or worse, in the middle of a directory or some other critical block. Again, the utilities provided can help you determine the extent of suc h damage. You can often rebuild the filesystem in such a way as to avoid the damaged areas. In this case, some data will be lost, but with some effort, you can recover a large portion of the affected data. When backing up your data, you need to decide whether to back up each file and directory separately, or in an archive with a collection of other files. You also need to decide  whether or not to compress your data to reduce the storage requirements for your backups. The time lost to compression and decompression may be offset to a degree by the reduced time it takes to write or read the compressed data to media or to transfer it through a network. To reduce the expense of compression, you may choose to compress the backup copies of your data as a background task after the data has been copied, possibly days or weeks after to reduce the storage requirements of older backups while keeping newer backups as accessible as possible. You should back up often enough so that you can recover data that’s still current or can be made current with minimal work. In a software development group, this may range from a day to a week. Each day of out-of-date backup will generally cost you a day of redevelopment. If you’re saving financial or point-of-sale data, then daily or even twice-daily backups are common. It’s a good idea to maintain off-site storage.