Data Backup and Restore > Backup Best Practices

A Few Words About Disaster Recovery

You should setup and maintain backup systems for all of your data to avoid losing important business information in the event of a hard disk failure (the most common cause for data loss), fire, flood or theft.

Here are some guidelines for keeping your data safe:

•Fact: The average life span of a hard drive is 3-5 years. There is a very good chance that your hard drive will fail during the life of your computer.

•Your hard disk will fail, so be prepared!

•Always backup data to a location other than where you store your data, so that if your main hard drive fails your will have backup data from which to restore.

•Never rely on only one form of backup. Murphy’s Law has been proven on many occasions -- Any backup system will fail at the worst possible time!

•Always move a backup of your data offsite at the very least every few weeks. If your facility burns or floods you want to make sure that you have your data safely stored in another location. This can be online, in another building or even at home.In addition to the standard backup methods included in Gym Assistant you might also consider the following alternatives:

Recommended Additional Backup Methods

Cloud Backup Services

Cloud backup services such as Carbonite, BackBlaze and iDrive provide automatic online backup of your computer data.

You should setup the service to backup at a specific time interval (e.g. every 6 hours) rather than continuously, because continuous backup can cause problems with Gym Assistant trying to modify data files while they are being backed up.

Backup to a Local Network Server

If your business or organization has access to a file server that is regularly backed up then you can either (a) locate your data on that server, or (b) setup Gym Assistant to automatically save archive backups to that server.

Backup to Another Computer

Just copy your most recent backup file occasionally to another computer on your network. If your main computer hard drive dies then you’ve got a backup immediately available for restore.

Got any questions? Reach out to us!

Please call or email [email protected] if you have any questions about backing up your data. We want to ensure that your data is safe!