You know me by now, right? There are certain things that I feel very strongly about! You know how much I adore the wonderful piece of machinery that is my laptop. You know that I think paper is the root of all evil. You can probably gather that my handwriting is horrible due to the fact that I rarely wield a pen. My entire life is stored on a 13″ wide piece of metal and plastic! You better believe that I am religious about backing it up. I’m here to tell you that you should be too!
What would you do if your computer crashed today? Do you have your pictures and videos stored there? Do you have your finanical information stored there? What about school documents, or work documents, a Powerpoint presentation that took you 3 months to complete? No matter what it is, if it’s important to you don’t subject yourself to a single point of failure.
Here is a fun story for you… early in my IT career I was thrown into a position I wasn’t quite ready for. I had recently joined the IT department of a home builder, and my boss/mentor left the company. I was the sole person left in the department. Naturally, I was in charge since there was no one else. A friend of mine would laugh at me because I would say “I AM the IT department”. Anyway, I did not value backups at the time, and really wasn’t checking them to make sure they were running. I just assumed they were. One day 2 hard drives failed on our RAID 5 file server (which for my non-techy friends means the server that holds all of the company’s files crashed REALLY bad, and was basically un-recoverable). Our last good backup was 6 months prior to that date. 11,000 dollars to a data recovery center later I learned the value of a backup!
So some quick ways to backup YOUR information….
External Hard Drive – Depending on the size of your important files, you might even be able to use a USB drive for this. Just right click and drag the files you would like to backup from the folder on your computer to a folder on the external drive. This will only backup your files (and only the files you actually copy to the hard drive)
Norton Ghost – This is actually my preferred method. Ghost will take a snapshot of your entire computer, so all of your programs, settings and files are completely recoverable. I just have mine set to run weekly and let it go. This also requires an external hard drive.
Online Backups – For a fee you can use any number of online backup systems. This will keep your files on a server at the company’s location. You would not need an external hard drive for this option, but you might want to make sure your internet connection can handle it.
CD – You can also place a CD or DVD in your disc drive and copy files to it to back them up.
Those are the easiest methods. Please go and backup your computer today! Trust me, you’ll thank me someday!