Backing Up Your Data
This is possibly the item that is most neglected by all home and small business computer users. And yet it is absolutely vital that we all do it. We must ensure that we can’t lose all our data in the event of our hard drive failing, or having some wipe-out of data due to whatever cause.
Below are some options for you to consider. Our preference, and therefore the one we use, is the first.
External Hard Drive
This involves purchasing an enclosed hard drive which connects to your PC using a USB cable. Its great virtues are that:
- It is relatively inexpensive. For example you can purchase an 80GB external drive for as little as $80.00 and then receive an $20.00 rebate. $60.00 for the peace of mind is true value.
- It is simple to use. You just plug it in to your PC at whichever time intervals you wish, perhaps daily, perhaps weekly, and then use simple copy commands to copy all your valuable data folders to the external drive (which will have been automatically recognized by Windows).
- It is secure. After backing up your data then you physically remove the external drive and put it somewhere safe; preferably somewhere where it can’t be affected by any disaster that could overtake the location of your PC.
When you get to the site simply click on the “Hard Drive” menu button on the left, and then select “External USB/Firewire”, again from the left menu.
Internal Backup Hard Drive
This involves purchasing and installing a new internal hard drive on your computer. You then copy all data to be backed up to this new drive. We don’t recommend this. It has the drawback that it is really subject to many of the risks as your main hard drive. Added to which there is not much point when you can get an external hard drive for a few dollars more.
Backing up to DVDs or CDs
This is an effective and probably the most economical way of backing up data. DVDs and CDs
are very inexpensive.
The virtues of this solution are that it is simple to do and the backup media can be
easily transported and stored.
The drawbacks are that one is limited by the capacity of the DVD or CD,
and one can end up with a library that has to be indexed in some fashion.
The external hard drive solution above, by comparison, gives you immediate total
visibility of all your backed-up data.
On-Line Backup
Backing up your data on-line, i.e., by storing it at one of the providers of this type of service on the Internet is very attractive at first glance. It is straightforward and can be done simply and swiftly, providing you have broadband access to the Internet. However, it is pretty expensive. An example of charges for this is $99.50 a year for providing storage for up to 5GB of data.
Whichever solution you go for you can use simple Windows functions to copy data in bulk to your backup media. There is also software available to make backups more efficient.