How to Backup and Encrypt your Personal Data

Gone are the days of keeping every document in paper format with files, now electronic storage devices overtook it completely. However importance of the documents is still the same and even increasing with increased complexity of daily life routines and business. So one point which we generally overlook for our personal data (mostly stored on computer hard disk) is to make sure that data is being available even in case of hardware or software failure and moreover it should be safe, and away from malicious hands.

Continuous availability of data is very much important to ensure that your work is being performed on time without any loss due to unavailability of data. However if your data is kept on a single location, there might be a risk that that location may not be available or is not in workable condition due to some problem. So the simple solution, to ensure the availability of data, is to make data available from more than one locations. It means that data should be placed at two ore more locations (depending upon importance of data), and data should be updated on all replication sites within a reasonable time duration. Following it, if any site is not working due to some problem, you can anytime switch to the alternative location and hence can continue your work without much delay. This is a solution to ensure the continuous availability of data and can be fulfilled by scheduled backup. Business Entities uses many commercial software to take the data backup, however, a home user may not need those heavy solutions. There are many free backup software available for home users. One of such tool is 'Comodo Backup', which is free available and is a good software for home users requirements. It provides following facilities:

How to Manage Outsourced Project

This is in  continuation of our last Article on 'How to Choose the Outsourcing Partner'. Now once you are done with selecting a possibly right outsourcing partner for your business,  next important step is to manage the outsourced project. Outsourcing the project does not mean that you  are free from the management related aspects. It only means that you need not to hire the resources on your  payroll and you can consider yourself free from long term liabilities of hired resources, and now virtually you can extend your team at any point of time without much efforts at your end. It could be a big mistake to consider yourself free from all project management aspect, and that could result in a bitter taste for outsourcing. So friends, when you outsource the project, you may need to consider it as virtual extension of your team and should continue to participate actively in management or execution. The difference will be that you can use management team of offshore partner as an extension of your management and hence can delegate some of the responsibilities. Of-course the level of involvement may vary from one scenario to other. This is one of the important point to consider. Further, here are few points which may help you to get a good result from outsourced project:

  1. Take it as Virtual Extension of your Team - Consider that offshore team as an virtual extension of your in-house team. This consideration should not only be in term of output expectations but also in