Putting together an almost fool-proof backup plan

Another popular solution in the high end of the market is continuous backup.

But even that would be unnecessary in some cases because (1) it can be taxing for your system (2) it would gobble up space very quickly (3) managing the changes would be very difficult (4) continual backup tend to be expensive (5) continuous data only saves already saved content.

For example, if you do a lot of editing in a session between two saves, you would not be able to recover a particular phase in the document editing process. Normally, you can only back up files that have already been saved on your hard disk.

Anything that is not saved remains in your computer's RAM and would be irremediably lost (although some might argue that this is not necessarily the case in Windows).

A backup plan brought to life

Below is a real life example of a backup plan for a small London-based 5-employees company.

The company has five desktop computers coupled to one NAS (Network Attached Storage). The NAS has a basic RAID-0 configuration (Mirroring function).

This means that the contents of one hard drive is mirrored to the other one in real time. If one hard drive experiences hardware problem, the second one can take over transparently.

The users do not store any important data on their computer hard drives.

They use a reliable, world class service provider that provides them with their mail services. Emails are both downloaded to the server and a copy is stored on the mail server.

The send/receive process runs every five minutes, so that any downtime only affects the last five minutes or so of mail.