A data backup strategy is essential for business users as well as home users who are constantly creating data for business purposes and for personal use. In both cases, this data becomes difficult to replicate or recreate because of its enormous size. A hard drive crash can be catastrophic, if a back up copy of this data is not routinely created.

You can imagine the state of a writer who loses a large part of his manuscript because of a hard drive crash. He may find it very difficult to recreate this lost data. The loss is even worse if the data that is lost comprises of personal images, audio and video files developed over the years

The same thing applies to businesses. Businesses store important information like financial records, customer data, plans and budgets and marketing collateral on computers. As more and more important files are stored on computer media, the need for a sound backup strategy becomes increasingly critical.

You need to plan your backups meticulously. For this, you can use the schedulers to draw up a back up schedule depending on how often you use your computer. One backup a day may be required for a business computer, while one backup a week may be sufficient for a home computer.

You must ensure that you have good anti-virus and anti-spyware software that is updated regularly. Hard drives can fail over time and need to be checked for bad sectors and errors.

You should also search for backup software that is reliable and easy to use. Read reviews and study the websites of different vendors to look for superior features and assurances of quality. Cheaper software may not be effective and you may end up losing your valuable data.

Choose a high quality medium that can be depended upon to store your data. You may have the best software and create backups very frequently, but it will all be useless if the medium on which you store your data is not reliable. To test the reliability of the medium you need to do test restores from it regularly.

You need to check the integrity of the restore to ensure that the data can actually be restored if there is a crash. The best way to do this is to buy a product like WinBackup 2.0 that is capable of bit level verification. The software first creates a backup and then verifies that each and every bit of data has been copied.

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