Why Techies Should Watch Their Backups
Have you ever lost any of the following: source code created by you or others? a document you’ve written and then overwritten with an older version? everything on your stolen laptop? work done by an employee who left the company? data that is thought to be backed up every night, but when it is deleted, you realize it wasn't?
Truth be told, backing up your work isn’t the sexiest topic on the block, but if it’s not done correctly, it can cost you time, money, your job, or your professional reputation.
If you are like me and most techies I’ve met, you do the proper due diligence upfront to properly set up your backup procedures and then just let it run and run and run. Then, the time you think about it next is when you lose something and quickly hope and pray that your backup procedures are still working.
Here are some quick things to consider regarding backing up your work:
- If you’re not using source code control, you should—even if you are the only programmer.
- Consider using SharePoint, Lotus Notes, or another equivalent for your document management. Not only does it do versioning, but it also can be used to publish it for others.
- If you work on a programming team and don’t want to use a second tool, consider storing your documents in your source control system. An advantage of this approach, in addition to only using one tool, is that you can associate your source code and documentation together as part of the same software release.
- As a test, once every month or two, rename a couple of your important files, try to restore them, and then do a file comparison to see that they were restored correctly.
- Once a year, review your backup strategies and processes. As technology advances, so do your potential backup options. Options like Carbonite were not available a few short years ago.
Properly backing up your work may seem like an obvious task. Well, it is. However, it is also too often an overlooked task. Over the years I have seen documents overwritten, source code lost, employees “accidentally” deleting files on their hard drive before leaving a company, and even a formalized backup process fail to back up files for almost six months before it was found and data was lost.
That last item cost a high-quality data center tech his job.
