Backing Up Your Data
On many occasions I have written about backing up your personal data (pictures, documents, videos, etc.) on my personal blog and other technology blogs and forums. I figured this is the perfect topic to start off this Tech Tips blog. You may ask, “why are you writing about it again then?”. My reason is this that no matter how many times you talk about it or suggest or recommend it, people will still ignore you. I figure if I continue to mention backups it’ll eventually hit home. Unfortunately for a few people I know, it took one incident of them losing their family pictures or work files before they finally listened to me.
Here’s the deal, straight and simple: The hardware that is in your computer right now, the hard drive, will fail. It will break down and be unusable. That means that all the files you have on that hard drive will be trapped with no way of getting to it. It will be lost. Don’t rely on that hard drive to always be available. We buy insurance for cars, homes and other property in case of a disaster. Think of data backups as an insurance policy in case of disaster to your hardware.
Now that I have preached the gospel of backing up, here’s how you do it. In previous years, the simplest way to back up was to buy a USB thumb drive or external USB hard drive and copy over your data to this external drive once or twice a week. I still recommend this method as a second option. Now in recent years, there are online solutions that will do this for you automatically without you having to remember to backup once or twice a week. These services will automatically backup your data every time you create or change a file. A few I recommend all depends on the amount (size) of data you currently have on your computer. Most of them are free to use, again, depending on the amount of data you have. The first I recommend is Dropbox as they offer 2GB of free storage to try. The others I recommend are IDrive and Spideroak as they also offer free storage once you sign up. The reason I recommend Dropbox is because it is really simple to use and it allows syncing the same files from one computer to another, if you have more than one computer. Basically, Dropbox has a lot of flexibility. IDrive and Spideroak are pretty simple to use also but there is no syncing between the computers. All of them have an application that you will need to download and install on your computer so that the online service will know what files on your computer it needs to backup online.
When I preach the gospel of backing up I am trying to save you from the headache of losing money, time and precious data. The loss of money can be in the form of you requesting someone like me to attempt to retrieve the data from your broken hard drive that usually comes at a high price. The loss of time can come from the same task and from the data you have created over time. And, of course, the loss of precious data could be from all those family pictures and videos over the years, or all those work spreadsheets you had been working on for hours.
I say all that to simply say this: backup your data.
If you need more assistance with data storage, please contact me for a brief free consultation. I can help you with the task of backing up your data.
