It is said that there are two types of computer users who will have a hard disk crash: those of us who have, and those of you who will! Once it happens, of course, all data stored on your hard drive is usually lost. Therefore, it's important to back up your data regularly. I asked the Allen F. Hainge CyberStars(tm) to share their strategies for backing up their data. Here are some of their responses:

Chris Newell of Main Street Realty, Milton, Ontario, Canada: "I am using a Ditto 2gig tape drive for most of my backups, and I have my administrative assistant burn my Top Producer file onto a CD-ROM every day. At 170mb, it takes about 15 minutes to do, and she does it while she's putting mail through the postage meter."

Greg Gorman of Downing-Frye Realty, Naples, Florida: "I use the Seagate Tape backup system for my network. I can put all 3 computers on one 10 gig tape drive. It makes an image of my network so that if I have a problem with any of the 3, it will restore everything completely including the Windows registry files."

Wayne "Shorty" Short of RE/MAX Realty Professionals, Wichita, Kansas: "Our tech has set us up with a second server with hot swappable drives. Every thing is automatically backed up. We don't even have to think about it."

Sharon Simms of Arvida Realty Services, St. Petersburg, Florida: "I backup onto a separate hard drive on my computer. Used to use one on the same computer, now I backup onto an old computer which is networked. Easy to do, easy to access."

Don King of RE/MAX of Rancho Bernardo, San Diego, California: "With my new desktop system, I ordered a Seagate TR-5 IDE Tape Backup System. It uses a TRAVAN tape cartridge with 20GB storage capacity. The system comes with a one-button backup capability, so you just shut down everything that is running, slide a tape into the deck, and double-click on the backup icon and everything on the system gets copied to the tape and then a routine runs to verify that everything copied correctly. Cost of the tape backup with one tape was $249. Additional tapes sell for a street value of about $30."

Ira and Carol Serkes of RE/MAX Bay Area Realty in Berkeley, California: "We started out with floppies - not recommended these days. Right now, I back up to a zip drive, using 6 zip disks to back up my data. If I were starting right now, I'd go with a CD-Read/Write drive. The zip drive backup is a no brainer, but now we have so much to back up that we'll get the CD-RW once we have time to spec it out."

Niel Thomas of Fortune Properties, Anchorage, Alaska: "Most newer computers can be configured with internal tape drives and the software to match. I dropped one into an available expansion slot in my older AST 166 MHz Pentium at the office; it was a pretty simple install. The tapes are such high capacity these days that there's no switching anything out. I set mine to cycle by backing up the hard drive every month and an incremental backup weekly. It's completely invisible on the Dell 450 MHz Pentium at home; both backup routines run in the middle of the night."

Published: May 11, 1999

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Editor's Note: This article reflects the opinions of Allen F. Hainge only and not necessarily the views of this or any other publication, organization or Website owner.

Allen F. Hainge is a nationally known real estate technology speaker and author with a difference: he builds his seminars and articles around concrete, practical experiences he learns from his CyberStars(tm), a group of top agents nationwide who use today's technology to dominate their marketplace. He is the author of "Dominate! Capturing Your Market With Today's Technology." Allen's seminar schedule and offerings may be found www.afhseminars.com. Subscribe to Allen's Newsletter by Clicking Here