Example 1: Yo' Momma. (aka, the Home User...)
Your mother is a great example of someone who needs a good backup strategy for a fairly small amount of important data. She may have an active email list, with addresses of friends and family. On her browser she may have an extensive list of bookmarks with her favorite recipes, auction sites, and the blog from her grand-nephew trekking across the US on a bike. Naturally, she has pile of photos she's taken with the digital camera you gave her for Mother's Day!
Most of her important data can be backed up pretty quickly and easily just by burning a CD or DVD of a few key folders. Even better, if she just has a little external hard drive like the LaCie d2 SAFE Hard Drive, she can copy to that in a second. Better still, she could run an automated program like Retrospect that will, every week, copy those folders to the drive without any work for her.
Archives at home are usually pretty simple. Thousands of songs, photos, and even movies can be archived to DVD using one of LaCie's DVD burning products. Once burned, just use a CD/DVD binder to store them. It's safe, it's accessible, and it's organized.
Example 2: SoHo is not just a nice place for a loft.
The Small Office, Home Office (SOHO) data management issues are not much different in substance than your mother's, just a little bigger in scale. The office generates more documents and resources that need to be managed, and may have a few users with distinct needs, but the framework can be very similar.
If you have just one or two workstations, they can be set up on routine of backup to a external hard drive or even backed up to a DVD, although this is less realistic since most offices are more concerned with the tasks at hand than running backup routines like burning disks.
With a network you can have access to a central hard drive or array of drives. Just by plugging external drives into a workstation and sharing them, they become accessible to everyone. Those drives can now be used as a central backup for the whole office.
If your office is using a server (like TSP's Server In-A-Box), it's easy to have a data management strategy. Our Server In-A-Box has built-in RAID hard drives set up to run seamlessly if a drive fails. Very often the server will be set up to backup to tape or hard disk on a schedule, in case the entire server fails. This is a great backup for your office's important data, but staff still needs to make sure that they put their current work on the server regularly.
Example 3: Big boys, big boys, whatcha gonna do?
Once you cross the line into larger server-based environments, you've really got a world of opportunity available to you for backup and storage options. You are probably going to have most of your backup run on the server, writing to tape. Many large organizations actually backup to off-site facilities through their network. (Most of New York's financial data is backed up to Hoboken, NJ, for example.)
Depending on the amount, type, and use of your digital assets, you may keep a small DVD-based library of documents, a moderate array of libraries of assets on a central file server, or even a web-based asset-management solution so your company can access assets all over the world. Asset management becomes an issue there - now you have to track your original documents, what has been used where, who is working with what files for which purpose. It can get pretty complicated. Some of the highest-level Project Management solutions are tens of thousands of dollars and require a costly subscription fee, but are worth every dime in the speed and efficiency they give you in managing huge amounts of digital assets.
The Common Thread
You may have noticed, we're not talking about one solution for each situation. Every specific environment uses a few well-chosen components, carefully fitted together to address the basic issues of backup, storage and organization. You need to back the data up constantly, you need to store the data you need access to, you need to back up your stored data and catalog it in an efficient way, and you need to have the most direct access to the files for the people that need them.
Whether you go with a simple strategy of burning a few CDs and placing them into a folder, or a redundant server-based library of assets depends on your individual work. Building the best system requires understanding the hardware and the configurations, but the most important thing is for you to make sure that you spend a little time thinking about your data management strategy before diving in. Of course, Tech Superpowers is always here to help - just or call us.
