Tom’s Tuesday Tech Tip: Can Legal Nurse Consultants Afford to Backup? Or Can You Afford Not to Backup?

I was speaking with a Certified Legal Nurse Consultant the other day who had just spent the last couple of days rebuilding her file system after a virus infected her computer. When I asked her why she didn’t reload her data files from her backup, she confessed that she hadn’t run a backup in over five months. The time she saved by not performing regular backups was minimal compared to the time it cost her to rebuild her system and search for “lost” files.

I backup my data files on my laptop to our corporate server every Friday. It’s a habit. I have a set of meetings I have to attend and those meetings run almost as long as my backup routine. When I get out of the meetings, my backup is almost done so it’s pretty painless for me.

“Hey Tech Tip Tom,” you might say to me, “How can I, one of your CLNC^® amigos, get the same backup ability?” That’s pretty easy. If you have multiple computers to back up, you can simply create a home network, jack in a portable hard drive like Western Digital^®‘s 500GB My Passport^® pocket drive which sells for just over $100. (Or, if you’re particularly flush, you could review my past blog and purchase a terabyte (1,000GB) backup drive), install the software and let it backup every evening or on whatever schedule you desire. Then, unless your home or office burns down (in which case you’ll have other worries), you’ll have a good backup of your legal nurse consulting business data.

If your computer gets wiped by a virus, lost or stolen or just plain crashes, you can simply restore the data to your new or cleaned computer from the backup. If you use a program like Norton Ghost (and have high-end computer skills) you can periodically image your hard drive, store the image (picture of all the contents of your hard drive) on the backup drive and then restore your computer from a good image (losing the data you created in between present day and last image).

These are fairly inexpensive methods (excluding “Ghost”) of creating backups because you buy the backup drive once and you’re good until it crashes or dies. It’s not for the faint of heart though. If you only have one computer to backup, connect it directly to the pocket or backup drive and skip the network.

Now I know some of you are thinking, “Holy backup beeper Tom, you lost me at hello!” Okay, I’m with you. Here’s the simplest, but not the cheapest method of backing up: an online backup service such as Mozy or Carbonite. These are great online backup systems that require ABSOLUTELY NO TECH SKILLS TO USE! Maybe I didn’t need to shout that, but it’s the beauty of these two systems. You simply sign up for the service, install the software, select the data you want to backup, the backup frequency and then just leave your computer on at night and it backs up to a remote server during “idle” time. Both systems encrypt the data so that it’s secure and can even be accessed remotely while you’re traveling (and your data is safe in the “cloud”).

Carbonite costs less than sixty dollars a year, Mozy costs under five dollars a month (so about the same) and both offer unlimited data storage. Here’s the kicker though, you’ll need to have a pretty fast upload speed on your Internet connection to make sure your backups run completely. You can test your Internet’s connection speed here. I’ve got about 30GB of data on my laptop including all my music and bunches of photos. At an upload speed of just over 640Kb/sec, my initial backup would take about 105 hours – not a great prospect. If I trim out the music and photos I’m down to about 5GB of data or about 17 hours of backup which is still not the most attractive prospect.

So, what can you do? First of all, get those vacation photos off your hard drive and back them up onto CDs or DVDs or onto a portable hard drive (we just spent more money). If you haven’t edited them by now you never will. See what else you can strip off that drive. You may be able to dump some of the music from your iPod^®. If you still have the source CDs you can always reload it later, it’ll take some time but you can do it. You can back up your “purchased” songs by burning them to a CD using iTunes’ built-in backup function. As for the rest of your music, experts tell us that once we’ve uploaded music to our iPods we can move the source files to an external drive (technically you can delete them but that scares me too much to try).

Once you take the time to get your backup data amount down to just what you think you need, excluding your operating system (OS) and installed programs (my OS and installed programs alone are 37GB), you’re ready to consider an online backup system like Mozy or Carbonite. That 105-hour initial backup could be done over a weekend, a very long weekend. All subsequent backups will be incremental and take much less time (only changed files will be backed up). If the amount of data with changes is still too much to backup in a reasonable period of time, then you should consider an external backup system.

Whatever backup solution you choose needs to work for you and your legal nurse consulting business. Take some time, evaluate the options but do make a decision to implement some form of backup. Can you afford to buy some backup solution? Yes, because you can’t afford not to.

Keep on techin’,

Tom