For any business large or small there needs to be some sort of backup system to protect your information. Information can be anything from contact information to record keeping to actually information based products. Backing up information and preparing for a disaster can be done in many different ways but as long as you reach the same goal of protecting your information.

You can use a variety of programs to backup information, from the windows backup utility, to 3rd party software, to open source or free utilities, to even on line services now for very cheap. But a few things should be consistent across the board about creating a backup plan.

1. Backups should be done consistently

2. Backups should be done at the very least everyday

3. Full backups should be done at least once a month if not every week

4. The backup plan should be reviewed frequently to make sure that every important is still being backed up

5. Test restores should be preformed frequently to find any problems in your backup program before it is to late.

Now as for a retention plan, one of the biggest things that companies do is keep their backups on a tape in the server or in the server room. If you are not using an on line backup system a copy of your backup should be taken to an off site location at least once a month. This way should a natural disaster happen you still have a backup of your files that at worst will be a month old. This method also gives you the opportunity to recover a file that has been missing but has gone unnoticed for up to a month.

Now there are four different types of backups, full backup, incremental backup, differential backup, and continuous backup. To understand how all of these different types of backups work you need to know about the archive bit. The archive bit is a setting on all files that will tell backup software whether it has been changed or not. Whenever a file is change the archive bit is set.

Full backups are just that they backup everything regardless of whether is has changed or not and it will clear the archive bit from all the files. Incremental backups will first make a full backup which will clear the archive bit and then everyday it will check all files for the archive bit. Any files that now have the archive bit set, meaning they have been change, will be backed up and the archive bit will be cleared. So with an incremental backup if you need to restore a folder that is on tape you will need the full backup tape and every incremental tape since then to restore.

Differential backups are similar except they don't reset the archive bit, first a full backup is taken and all the archive bits are cleared. Then every day a differential backup is run where if the archive bit has been set the file is then backed up but the archive bit is NOT cleared. So through out the week the differential backup will be backing up more and more files until we do a full backup again. The advantage of a differential backup is that if we need to restore a folder we will only need the full backup tape and the last differential tape that was done to restore and entire folder.

For smaller businesses I would recommend going to an on line backup system because it will totally alleviate most of the headache in purchasing backup software and configuring it yourself. IDrive is one of these on line backup companies that allows you to download their client program and then use their continuous backup system. IDrive will also give you 2 gigs of free space, so if what you are backing up is less then 2 gigs you can get the service for free. KeepIt.com is yet another one of these systems that provides on line backup so you don't have to worry about changing tapes or moving information to an off site location. On line backups do it all for you.

For larger enterprise businesses I would recommend some form of tape backup such as BriteStor from ArcServe which provides a very flexible backup software along with a tape drive that can store more data than you would ever want and with no monthly charge. But programs such as BiteStor require quite a bit of setup time from an IT specialist and quite a bit of maintenance to make sure