Upgrading and Repairing Networks (5th Edition)

One of the most important things you can provision in your SOHO network is a means to create regular backups of your data. Applications, as mentioned earlier, should always be copied (and the copy used, with the original safely stored elsewhere). Most software licenses allow you to make backup copies; you just can't give these backups to your friends as "evaluation copies."

But you do need to back up data files and other information on a regular basis. The frequency will be determined by weighing the cost of having to re-enter the data (or lose it). It used to be common practice to use a tape drive to back up an entire drive from a PC. Today, with disk drives with capacities of over 180GB, it may not be practical to wait a few days for a backup to complete ”or use a more expensive tape drive costing thousands of dollars. You can still use an expensive tape drive if you just want to copy a few important data files, or you can use a low-cost CD burner to do the same. CD burners can use both write-once and read/write media, and at their price-point now, they are a viable means for creating backups for a SOHO environment.

Another method you can use is to copy data from one computer to another. If you have a second drive installed on another computer, you can create a nightly batch job to copy files to that other computer. You can use this method to copy data from a set of more than two computers, ensuring that all important data files are safely stored in more than one place.

If lightning strikes, however, be sure your surge protector or UPS is capable of withstanding this kind of event, or you could still lose it all!

Networking equipment is so inexpensive today that using a single computer and exchanging data with other business associates of other computers at your SOHO is now just impractical . A small network should cost less than a few hundred dollars (depending on the number of network adapters and cables you have to buy). The technology has become so simple that just about anyone who can read a few pages of documentation can have a SOHO network up and running in a few hours or less.