Backing Up Your Computer

You always hear about how someone lost all their data. Data, pictures, music…gone. There are some instances where there’s nothing you can do to prevent your hard drive from crashing… like hardware failure. The average lifespan of a hard drive is approximately 5 years. Do you know how old your hard drive is? Hard drive failure should be the least of you worries though. Viruses and malware are your biggest threat and can be kept at bay with a good anti virus and anti malware program.

With the cost of hard drives as low as they are right now, you can easily afford to buy an internal or external hard drive to safely backup all important information from your computer.  An internal hard drive is located in your computer and if you have a desktop, you more than likely can add another one right next to your current hard drive for a great place to copy everything important. So if the main hard drive fails or you can’t get into your operating system (OS), you can rest assured that your data is always safe on the second hard drive (as recent as your last backup).

An external drive is a nifty thing to have around. There are 3 general types of external hard drives on the market: USB, Firewire, and network. The most common is the USB external hard drive which can be plugged into your computers USB port. They work just like a USB pen drive but have a much greater capacity limit. When you plug an external hard drive into your computer, Windows will install it and it will assign a drive letter to it. You can then access it from “My Computer”. The great thing is mobility. For example, you could copy all you photos from one computer, put them on the external drive, then copy them to another computer. I like to use an external drive to copy customer’s files that they want to save from their computer before reinstalling their OS. When done, I copy all the files back to their computer.

The Actual Backing Up Process

There’s a ton of software companies out there that can backup your data in a few easy steps and some people love them. I, on the other hand, don’t like having to deal with another software package installed on my computer. I like good old copy and paste partly because I know where all my data is scattered around the hard drive and I like being able to view my external hard drive files rather than seeing one big compressed file that alot of the backup software companies like to create. Most backup software programs like to copy all the files you selected for backup and compress them into one big file that is pretty much useless unless you open the compressed file with the same program that you created it with. If you decide to purchase a backup program, I would definately check the output formats.

Before external hard drives, I used a program called “Nero” which would allow you to backup files to multiple CDs or DVDs. It’s a relativly simple program and the output is the same as copy and pasting files.

Safe Than Sorry

I’ve talked to several people who have had their hard drive crash (hardware failure) and had to ship their hard drive off to a recovery company because they didn’t have any backups of their data. The services cost thousands of dollars and they can’t guarantee to recover all the data, if any. This raises the question, “How much is your data worth?”.

If you have any questions or want me to explain further, feel free to submit a comment.