It's Backup Month! Throughout February, we'll be discussing tools, resources, and strategies to help you keep your data backed up and ready to restore. Check out our new resources from each week below and join in the discussion. Additionally, if you'd like to receive regular updates on low-cost, high impact tech for your nonprofit or library, sign up to receive our weekly By the Cup newsletter or monthly New Product Alert.

Week 4

• After the Crash: Minimize Your Downtime (TechSoup Talks! Webinar)
  Thursday, February 25, 11 a.m. Pacific
  
  Computers crash, viruses infect, and disasters happen. But they don't have to affect your ability to continue working if you're prepared. There are some key things you should know about your computer system and your applications, as well as things you should do with your data to ensure that you’re back up in a few hours instead of a few days.
  
  Kami Griffiths will interview Laura Richardson from Uptime Resources to help you understand what you can do to get your system ack up and running so your staff can continue to do their work. It will open your eyes to the risks you should be aware of and the things that can help prevent data lose. You'll also hear from Gregory Seeley, a TechSoup Global Customer Service Representative, who will give an overview of how you can retrieve the products requested through TechSoup's donation program.
  
  This webinar is appropriate for executive directors, IT staff, accidental techies, and anyone else who is responsible for maintaining your nonprofit or library's computers and data.
• A Few Good Tools for Online Data Backup (Learning Center)
  Backing up your data remotely is an excellent solution, especially when it's done as one part of a backup strategy that also includes regularly scheduled local backups. Idealware has compiled a list of online backup tools that might work for your nonprofit.
• Disaster Planning: Backup, Backup, Backup! (Archived TechSoup Talks! Webinar)
  In this archived TechSoup Talks! webinar, TechSoup's Becky Wiegand interviews Nutmeg Consulting's Chris Shipley and Sarai's Zac Mutrux about the different types of backup options including hardware, portable devices, and hosted services.
• Backing Up Your Mobile Devices (TechSoup Blog)
  Smartphones are certainly becoming more ubiquitious, and data sprawl is becoming rampant. Be sure your backup plan includes your phone and other mobile devices.
• Outlook Add-in: Personal Folders Backup (Free Download)
  If you are using Outlook but not Exchange server, all your Outlook information, including your contacts, calendar entries, and email, is stored in a personal folders file (.pst file). This add-in simplifies the oft-neglected backup of this file, by adding a menu item directly on your Outlook client, and can be set to remind you of your backup.
• Read more

Computers crash, viruses infect, and disasters happen. But they don't have to affect your ability to continue working if you're prepared. There are some key things you should know about your computer system and your applications — and things you should do with your data — to ensure that you're back up in a few hours instead of a few days.

On Thursday, February 25 at 11 a.m. Pacific time, Kami Griffiths will interview Laura Richardson from Uptime Resources during a free webinar to help you understand how you can get your system back up and running so your staff can continue to do their work as quickly as possible. The discussion will open your eyes to the risks you should be aware of and to the measures that can help prevent data loss.

• Read more

The writers at Gizmodo, a technology blog focused on gadgets and new technology, did a comprehensive blog post on backing up your mobile devices. Smartphones are certainly becoming more ubiquitious, and data sprawl is becoming rampant. They list backup methods by each mobile platform, so there is a solution for all users no matter if they use an iPhone, Blackberry, Palm, or Windows Mobile device.

Did you know that September is National Preparedness Month? Agility Recovery Solutions, a disaster recovery specialist, together with FEMA, is hosting a series of weekly webinars this month. Readers and followers of TechSoup are no doubt familiar with our resources on disaster planning and recovery, and Agility's webinars introduce some interesting topics as well such as "Pandemic Planning: How to Prepare your Business for the Upcoming Flu Season" with a former associate Chief Medical Officer from the Department of Homeland Security on September 16, and "Social Media: What Role Does It Play in Business Preparedness" with a Public Information Officer from FEMA on Sept 23. The free webinars are also archived in case you can't make those times.

Photo: Robert Thomson, CC license

This post is mainly for Mac users. If you're not a Mac user, many of the points here will still apply to you, but some of them won't. You might prefer this video of a dog eating Potato Olés.

If you haven't already, check out our new guide, The Resilient Organization: A Guide for Disaster Planning and Recovery. This book represents several months' worth of research and numerous people's expertise, and we think it'll be a helpful resource for nonprofits and public libraries.

Working on the book got me thinking about my own backup strategies for my home computer. About two years ago, my old iBook G4 started to get slow and it seemed that the hard drive was probably on its way out. I was still covered by AppleCare at the time, so I bought an external MyBook drive and downloaded SuperDuper, in hopes that I'd still be under warranty when the internal drive inevitably died. No such luck.

Like most backup programs, SuperDuper gives you the choice of whether to back up only your own personal data (your home folder) or your entire drive, including the operating system and applications. To back up the entire drive, select "Backup - all files." (This is often referred to as a mirror image.) The benefit of this sort of backup is that if you need to, you can boot the computer from it. That's a huge plus for a lot of reasons: if something happens to your internal drive, you can still boot from the external drive. If you need to send the computer to the shop, you can boot from your backup drive on a separate Mac and keep working as usual.

Don't forget, you can join our good friends at NTEN almost every day for their live office hours sessions. Each day, a nonprofit technology expert spends an hour in NTEN's chat room, ready to help out your nonprofit in his or her area of expertise.

Traci Magleby will be available to discuss off-site data backup solutions tomorrow, March 3, at 1 p.m. Eastern time. Check out NTEN's calendar for future sessions. It's easy to keep up to date with office hours: you can subscribe using Google Calendar, iCal, Outlook, and similar programs.