Data backup is an essential task to perform if you don’t want your valuable files to be lost or damaged for any reason. Imagine you have a valuable wedding photo album and tons of your golden moments stored on your computer hard drive lost due to hard drive crash. You will never get those unforgettable moments replicated or reproduced. In businesses, imagine thousands of critical files as a result of years of hard work by your employee lost due to a disaster and you don’t have a well-managed backup system, how can you get those critical files back?
Unfortunately, not all users are aware of the importance of data backup. But in enterprises, a well-managed backup strategy should be implemented as part of business continuity and disaster recovery planning. With a well-managed backup, if you ever lose or corrupt your files or in the event of a disaster, you don’t need to panic, you can always restore your files. For home users, what is an easy way to set up your environment to automatically back up? Consider building your wireless network using Apple Time Capsule 1T or 2T storage.
With Apple Time Capsule, you can create your wireless network environment with the ability to automatically back up your computer data. You only need to backup once for the first time, it will probably take all night depending on how big your data is and then the system will sync the data only if the files changed or updated. All backup operations from computers (Mac or PC) are performed automatically through a wired or wireless connection to your network.
Time Capsule is basically a fully featured Airport Extreme Base Station. The device works with the latest 802.11n technology to provide high-speed wireless networking and backup for all your Mac and PC computers, all in one device. Your device supports dual-band wireless n technology to support all Wi-Fi devices that use the 2.4 GHz or 5 GHz frequency bands, including Mac computers, PCs, iPhones, iPod touch, and Apple TV.
Remote access
With Time Capsule you can access your data over the Internet wherever you go. If your computer is Mac OS X Leopard or Snow Leopard, you can be a MobileMe member. With MobileMe, you can register your Time Capsule with your MobileMe account and the drive will appear in the sidebar of your Mac Finder and you’ll be able to access the drive when you’re on the go from anywhere as if you had a personal file server wherever you go.
USB port
Your Time Capsule includes a USB port that you can use to share a network-accessible printer. You can also add a USB hub to allow you to share the printer and add more external drives at the same time. Therefore, you do not need to purchase a separate print server device.
Secure guest access
If you want to share Internet access with your guests, you can create secure guest access without compromising your private network resources, such as your attached storage. Use the included Airport utility and create a separate Wi-Fi network for your guests with a different password or even no password at all.
Time Capsule T1 or T2 is the ideal solution for home wireless network that supports automatic backup over wireless network. For small and medium-sized businesses, Time Capsule might not be a good solution. In small and medium-sized businesses with Windows Server 2003 or later, you can configure Volume Shadow Copy Services (VSS). One of the advantages of VSS on Windows Server 2003 or later is the ability to restore previous versions of files. In companies, it often happens that people accidentally overwrite the original document files while updating the files that are supposed to be saved with different file names. With VSS support, you can restore previous versions of your document files.
VSS is not the solution for your full enterprise backup strategy, but it does help you easily restore your files in some situations. You still need a well-managed backup strategy that includes your backup appliance and software as part of your business continuity and disaster recovery planning.
By Ki Grinsing
