What would happen if you lost everything on your computer?
It’s not fun – let me tell you.
Fortunately I haven’t had this experience for a LONG time but I’ve certainly seen it happen to others more times than I can count.
And it’s never a pretty sight.
A lot of people I know don’t really keep anything on their computer anymore – they just use it to access the internet. In that case, it’s not the end of the world if a hard drive crashes.
But what about the rest of us who do have important stuff on our computers? Documents, pictures, movies…
And what exactly can you back up?
Here’s some basic backup information;
First – I always tell people; if you have anything important saved on a hard drive, you’d better be darn sure it’s saved somewhere else too – I can’t tell you how many hard drives I’ve seen fail over the years…LOTS.
I even had an experience once where a website that I was managing which was hosted by an online company went down and BOTH their hard drives (they’re redundant so if one fails the other still has the data) failed at the SAME TIME. Remarkable. Good thing I had a backup of the website on my own hard drive.
The point is; this sort of thing does happen, and it’s not as uncommon as you think. Particularly with hard drive manufactures now seemingly willing to accept a 20-30% failure rate of their new drives in the FIRST YEAR. Also remarkable.
So, as I say; if it’s important – keep it on MORE than one hard drive. A USB flash drive, online backup, DVDs – whatever – just make sure it’s not only on a single hard drive because some day, inevitably, that drive that’s been spinning at 7200rpm all it’s life, is going to fail.
There are now TONS of online backup providers and this is a pretty good way to go if A) you have a bunch of stuff that you just want backed up automatically and, B) you don’t care too much about the privacy of that data.
Here’s a decent article comparing some of the online backup providers:http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2288745,00.asp
At this point, you really can’t count on full privacy with any online backup provider – the government has pretty much done away with the idea of online privacy, so regardless of what the online backup company says, there have been countless betrayals of personal privacy to the feds from companies claiming to be completely private and secure. If your stuff needs to be truly confidential – think twice about online backup.
But, as I say – if this isn’t important to you, and if you just want all your stuff backed up automatically, online backup isn’t a bad way to go, and it’s gotten pretty cheap too ($5/month is pretty common).
Some of the better online backup solutions now offer full drive imaging – which means that you can restore the entire hard drive as it was on the day it failed, to a new replacement hard drive. Short of this type of backup though, if your drive did fail, you would be stuck reinstalling Windows, all your programs, all your settings, etc. – because these items generally can’t be backed up by conventional means.
If you just want to cover the bare minimum, copy all your important documents, pictures, etc., and paste them onto a USB flash drive, an external hard drive, or burn them to a DVD. You can take this one step further and bring that backup device off-site in case of fire. It might sound silly, but if your whole life (or business) is on that backup drive, it’s worth the effort.
One last thing, perhaps the most important thing in this email: Many new computers don’t come with any sort of recovery media (a DVD that you can use to reinstall Windows if your hard drive fails). To create this disc, which I HIGHLY recommend, go to the start menu and type “sdclt.exe” into the search box (no quotes) and hit enter. This should pull up a window with the option to “Create a system repair disc” on the left. Get a blank CD or DVD and put it in your drive and go through this process. This disc may save you a LOT of headache down the road. It’s definitely worth the effort.
Alright, that’s all for now – if you have any questions about backing up your data, don’t hesitate to ask. The main point of this email was to get you thinking about it because it IS important and because the folks who don’t think about it BEFORE something goes wrong end up paying the price WHEN it goes wrong. Don’t be that person!