| Hard Drives Are Not Forever
Bob Rankin from Tourbus gives a few hints on Backup.
They can fail without warning, a virus could
wipe out your data, fire or flood could damage the drive, or it might even
get stolen. You might accidentally delete a file or an entire folder of
important files with an errant click. And it's not only emergencies that
make backups important... if you buy a new computer, a backup can make
it much easier to copy your files from the old computer to the new one.
Backup Strategies
Do you need to backup all your files, or just
certain ones? That depends on how you use your computer, how important
your data is, and how much you want to think about backups. If your drive
fails, you can reinstall the operating system and all your software. But
the data you've created and stored (word processor documents, spreadsheets,
emails, photos, music, etc.) may not be replaceable.
So at a very minimum, you should decide which
are your most important files and make backups. Here are some easy ways
to back up a set of files:
* Attach the files to to
an email and send them to friend. Or open a free web-based email account,
and send the files to yourself.
* Copy them to another
computer on your home or office network.
* Upload them to your website,
or free web space.
* Burn them to a CD.
* Copy them to a flash
drive or external hard drive.
Do this often - daily, weekly or monthly -
you decide based on how often you update the files and how critical it
is to have access to the most recent data in the event your hard drive
crashes and burns. But be warned that recovering from a hard drive failure
will be a nuisance if you opt to backup only your data files. It will take
quite a few hours to re-install your operating system and all the software
that you had. If you downloaded software, you might have lost the license
or registration keys along with your data, too.
Backup on Auto-Pilot
I strongly advise automated full system backups,
because EVERYTHING is safely squirreled away, and restoring your data can
be accomplished with a few clicks. You could back up your data on a bunch
of CDROMs, but you'd need a LOT of them to back up a modern hard drive,
which can store 100GB or more. CD-ROM disks hold about 700MB of data, so
even with compression you'd need over 100 of them to get the job done.
Not very convenient, especially if you ever need to restore the data.
Since hard Disk drives are cheaper than ever,
I recommend you get an external hard drive and use it as a backup device
for one or more computers. You can buy a large capacity external drive
for well under $1 per gigabyte. The Iomega 33xxx series and the Maxtor
OneTouch get high marks from reviewers and users, but other manufacturers
such as Seagate and Western Digital make good products as well. Look for
a drive that supports a USB 2.0 connection, or the faster FireWire hookup
if your system supports it.
Backup Software
Backup software is also recommended, to help
you automate the process of making automatic full or incremental backups,
and to restore just one deleted file or the entire drive. A good backup
program will even allow you to store multiple versions of a file, so you
can go back in time and restore a file to the way it was a day, a week
or a month ago.
I use Acronis True Image (Windows) but have
heard great things about Retrospect (Windows/Mac), which comes free on
the Maxtor OneTouch drives, and SmartSync (Windows).
Loosing data that you've spent countless hours
creating is one of the most frustrating things that can happen to a computer
user. When it comes to backups, don't think too hard about whether or not
it's worth the trouble. It takes only a little time and money to set up
automatic full system backups that give you peace of mind and protection
from data disasters.
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