Most people don’t realize the importance of backing up their data, until it’s too late.

Backup your hard drive so you don’t loose all your precious files. Your photos are what you will miss most. I’ve had it happen to me years ago.

An example comes to mind, recently I had a customer who brought a laptop in  for a failed hard drive. Usually when someone tells me “the big box store said i need a new hard drive” I tend to do my own checks. Because on more than one occasion I’ve had perfectly good hard drives that “needed to be replaced” due to a corrupt windows installation. 9/10 times its not a bad hard drive.

 

So this one customer said it was making awful scratching noises so I didn’t want to mess around too much. I went into the hard drive and started backing up everything i possibly could before the HD failed completely. I managed to save the clients music, photos, documents etc. They were extremely happy considering they thought they were GONE FOREVER.

Once I got the computer back up and running (with a brand new hard drive) all their files put back onto the computer, I asked if they wanted me to setup a backup plan for them.

I have my favorites for data backup, but there are many choices out there for scheduling a backup of your important files. There are also ways to completely copy your entire hard drive as an image if you don’t want to loose anything. However for most personal computer users saving  their “user” folder is sufficient.

Backing up to another physical hard drive is almost mandatory,  if you save to the same hard drive (even a new partition) you risk loosing that data when / if your hard drive fails again.

So where do you backup all your data to?

It’s highly recommended to grab yourself a nice portable hard drive, or save to a network location. And setup your favorite backup software to save your files weekly, monthly, even daily if you prefer.

There are also ONLINE options available, because you need an internet connection to get your data back.  Online backup will save your butt in case of a fire or loss of the onsite device, so you see there are pros and cons to both methods

Just one more note: Consider doing one main backup at first, then choose a software that will save only your changed files upon every future backup (incremental). This means, lets say you have 20 gigabytes to save, your first backup would be 20 GB, and your changed files could be a few hundred megabytes, so your second backup could be 2-300MB rather than 40.3 GB the second run, you see this can save a lot of time and space on the device.

Thanks for reading, and if you need any backup solutions setup don’t hesitate to contact me and I can help you out. DON’T wait until it’s too late.