For Christmas this year I got my first-ever hard disk crash … this after 25 years of working pretty much full time with computers (I guess it was my turn).

It was more of fender bender than a full-blown wreck but it still had the effect of requiring that I restore my computer using my distributed backup system – which, though less elegant than sounds, actually worked out fairly well but, like my old Auntie, had a few warts on it. More about that in a future post.

For now, I like to share an excerpt from an email sent to me by my good friend at Alta-Publishing.com in which he shares some good backup solutions he’s identified.

I would have to say this software works pretty well . . . saved my bacon on the last crash, although it was still an issue recovering the backup files (because I was using a network drive instead something like a USB drive). The only thing I don’t like is that it uses a proprietary format.

These are the same folks that make the Plesk and Virtuozzo server software. Acronis True Image backs up just data, or data / sys / apps.

If you ONLY want to back up data, SyncBack also works well and keeps files in their native format.

Much more to follow about how best to de-catastrophize your small business data assets.