All too often, our office computers are disasters waiting to happen. We store huge amounts of important information on them and risk losing it all by neglecting to back up the data. No amount of casualty insurance will recoup the loss of the data on stolen or destroyed computers.
Industry statistics show that fully 10% of hard drives fail in any given year and that 43% of computer users lose one or more files every year in the form of clinical data, financial records, photos, e-mail, documents, and other important information. Recovery of lost data, when it's possible at all, can be very expensive.
Yet a Harris Interactive study last year found that 35% of Americans admitted they never back up their computers. And amazingly, many people who have lost important data in a crash still refuse to do regular backups. Why do so many of us neglect such a basic precaution? Because it's inconvenient and time-consuming. Clearly, the only way to get many people to back up their data regularly is to make the process automatic.
Some computer companies have taken steps in that direction. Apple, for example, has a feature called Time Machine that backs up Macs to an external drive automatically. But that does you no good if, for example, a fire destroys the computers and also incinerates the backup drives.
So, the first rule is to store your backup drives in a different location from your computers. Unfortunately, that's a pain, too, and external drives can be lost or stolen, creating a HIPAA nightmare. So an increasingly popular alternative is automatic remote backup.
Several companies offer this service: two of the most popular are Mozy (www.mozy.comwww.carbonite.com
The cost is very reasonable for individual computers. In fact, Mozy lets you store up to two gigabytes of data for free. Its basic package, which includes unlimited storage, costs $4.95 a month per computer. Carbonite is a bit cheaper ($49.95 per year, also for unlimited capacity), but Mozy is a little more customizable, and you can specify the files you want regularly backed up and when it will be done. Backing up an entire office costs more, depending on how many computers and/or servers you have, but it's still very reasonable and includes other services such as operating system and network share support.
The procedure is simple: You create an account and tell the service which files to copy. Your first backup can take a long time, often days, depending on how much data you are sending and the speed of your Internet connection. After that, the program runs in the background, copying only files that have changed since the previous backup. Files are encrypted before leaving your computer, and they remain encrypted at the service's data center, making them HIPAA compliant and, theoretically, accessible only to you.
To restore files, you open a sort of virtual representation of your backed-up files and click on what you want restored. You also can log into the Web site from any other computer and pick any file or folder to retrieve. If your computer is stolen or the hard drive is destroyed, you can go to a site to initiate a full restore to a new computer. Remote backups might even help you recover a lost or stolen machine: If the finder or thief opens new files, they will be backed up to your new machine, which could allow you (or the police) to trace the original computer's whereabouts.
If you ever decide to terminate the service or simply want a hard copy of your data, Mozy will send you a DVD of all your files, for a fee. (Carbonite does not mention this service on its site.)
Soon, though, you might be able to use these services for a lot more than simply storing and retrieving files. Mozy's parent company, EMC, has announced a new subsidiary called Decho (www.decho.com