BACKING UP YOUR company's computers is absolutely essential – if you lose computer data, you could also lose your business. The more you can do to protect against data backup nightmares, the more time and money you can reserve for moving the business forward. But there's more than one way to back up your data, depending on your company's budget, the number of computers that require backup, and whether or not you use a network.

Here are a few of the backup options available:

Use recordable media. Once upon a time, you could back up your entire computer on a few floppy disks or Zip disks. Those days are now long past ? but now we have CD-R and DVD-R media. CD-Rs can hold up to 700MB of data, and double-layer DVD-Rs can hold up to 8.5GB. Depending on the size of your hard drive, though, you may end up spending lots of time burning multiple disks to safeguard your data.

Get a second hard disk. You can install a drive that's just as big as your existing hard disk and then copy, or "mirror," all of the data on the second drive. Hard disk prices have dropped considerably, and mirroring a disk makes it easy to replace lost data. But keeping all of your backup data on the same system leaves it vulnerable to the same problems that might affect your primary hard disk.

Use an online backup service. These services allow you to upload your data over the Internet to remote servers – if you need to restore lost data, you simply log on to the backup service and download your files. Internet backup services offer several benefits: they're cheap, easy to use, and very reliable. But Internet backups can be slow, and you'll need Internet access to retrieve your backup files. You should never rely only on Internet backups; if the company storing your data goes out of business, your data might vanish too. Read Is It Safe to Store Files on the Internet? to allay some of your concerns about this method.

Use a software backup program. A backup utility, like Norton Ghost or the backup utility that comes bundled in Windows XP, can take the headache out of backing up your data. It's not meant to replace any of the three methods above; rather, it just automates the backup process. You tell it when and where, and the program can automatically back up your data to the location of your choice.

What's Better: Local or Network Backups?

If your business uses a network, you'll have to decide whether to back up all of your computers over the network or back up each computer separately. In most cases, you should back up all of the computers on a network along with your file servers; that way, you can purchase a single high-end backup system for your whole network. It's much more expensive to buy a separate backup unit for each computer, and it's a waste of time to lug a portable backup drive from one computer to another.

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