After my recent computer crash, which seems to be at least twice a year at the moment, I thought I would revisit the subject of “backups” something that is critical to recruitment or any other business of course.

In the past I would have backed up my data on CD’s, which was never as often as I should have, and I always managed to lose some data. (It is also worth noting that CD’s have a limited time date, as they degrade).

One of the advantages of using a web based recruitment software package is your resumes and contact details are backed up off site automatically, so if your computer crashes you can always work on someone else’s while its being fixed.

Whatever the case you still need to back up those contacts and cv’s off site, and the best way without an ASP recruitment package, is to use a virtual server or an online backup system.

Fortunately the prices are now coming down, which I am sure is reflected by the number of competitors there are, you may want to visit Mashup for their recent list of 80+ File Hosting sites they have compiled. 

Over the last 8 months I have been using www.box.net, which is free up to 1 GB and has an easy interface, where you can drag and drop your resumes onto their server. More recently I have been using Omnidrive which integrates into your computer so you have a virtual harddrive, but unfortunately they do not do automated backups. 

So before I finally wrote this post I wanted to find a good alternative and after checking out a few sites I finally opted for Crash Plan, it isn’t expensive and you get a 30 days free trial, which always helps. What I liked about their offering was its simplicity in its setup and they give you an option of backing up between computers, such as one in the office an one at home, without the cost of having to pay for a server application if you do not want it. Still it certainly saves you having to remember to take your CD home! In addition it does automated backups and at times to suit you, which makes it the real winner.

Which is the best offering, well that is a little difficult to say, particularly as I have not checked out the other 70 odd, but I do like the 3 I mentioned earlier for different reasons. At the end of the day it will come down to cost, but so long as you some kind of backup off site, then you will be able to sleep at night if someone steals your computer or it decides to give up on you.

One final thought and tip regarding emails, which are just as valuable as the cv’s of course and that is to set up a imap account rather than the pop3 for your emails, that way all correspondence will be saved on a virtual server, with the added benefit of being able to read them from any computer with web access. A small thing but in my opinion essential, if only someone had told me about that a few years back!