You're not keeping regular backups of your computer data? Are you running a fever? This is one of the single most important tasks any computer user should carry out on a regular basis. It doesn't matter how careful you are sooner or later you're going to suffer from data loss. It's always the people who think it will never happen to them suffer from the worst cases of data loss.
Who you are will decide on the types of data you have on your PC. If you're a mom or parent you might have lots of holiday pictures of your kids and other personal information. Or you might be a mom or dad running a home business and you keep all your important business information on your computer. If you value any of this you should at the very least make a copy of all those important files and folders and keep them somewhere safe.
Once upon a time floppy disks were the best way to make a quick backup but no modern computer is shipped with a floppy drive so you can rule that out. Your other choices are external hard drives, USB flash drives and CDRW/DVDRW drives and/or another internal hard drive.
In terms of basic storage devices that are probably already fitted to your computer then we can look at CDRW and DVDRW drives. These will allow you to backup anywhere from 700MB to about 9GB of your files. Your next step up from there are USB flash drives which start at about 2GB and go to about 128GB in terms of storage space. The next option is external USB hard drives - these start in the 60GB range and are available in sizes over 1TB. After that then you're looking at a second internal hard drive that's dedicated to data backup - the sky is almost the limit when it comes to the amount of storage space you can choose here.
That deals with your local backup options but keeping only local backups of your data really isn't a good idea. It only takes one lightning strike, flood or small fire and you'll lose all your backups either way. Using some kind of online backup service isn't optional - it's something you should be using if you really take your data backup seriously. Online backup tools usually schedule the backups for you so even if you forget to follow your normal backup routine the online service will backup your data anyway. There are lots of online backup services to choose from but if you want a few suggestions then check out the resource box at the end of this article.
Do yourself a favor and don't just rely on one type of backup device or system - make sure you use at least 2 e.g. an external USB drive and an online backup facility. At least then you'll have full peace of mind.
Do you have any idea how much it would cost you to have all that data on your hard drive restored? Hundreds if not thousands of dollars! Get smart about doing backups and make sure that you're doing proper computer backups on a regular basis. There are free solutions for doing this and even the paid ones don't cost the earth. Discover more now -> click here.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Niall_Roche
View the original article here
This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.
No comments:
Post a Comment