I’ve made mention that I was going to discuss backup and here it is.
As the title indicates, this is likely the single most important thing you aren’t doing with your computer. When you drive a car, you usually have auto insurance to help pay for an accident or theft. When you own a home, you have homeowners insurance to pay for a major catastrophe. So, why don’t you backup the data on your computer?
There are so many things that can fail on your computer that will cause you to lost your data. Starting with the hard drive itself, unless you have one of the newer (and significantly more expensive) solid-state hard drives, your drive is a mechanical part and it will eventually wear out and fail. There’s no “if” here, only a “when.”
Backup doesn’t need to be particularly difficult, either. You can purchase large hard drives inexpensively enough (I’ve seen external terabyte [1000 gigabyte] drives for about $100 recently). They come with software which, while not particularly fancy, will get the job done. Myself, I prefer to use other software (most of which is freely available) as it allows easier access to your data in the event that you need to recover due to a failure.
I’ve mentioned hardware failure here and nasty software in previous posts. What about the accidental deletion? I’ve done that myself a time or two and it can be quite frustrating. In my home, I’ve made the pictures I’ve taken available for anyone else in the house to gather. Once, another person overwrote the original with a lower-quality edited version. Recovering from a backup was the simplest method of fixing that situation.
In addition to backing up to an external hard drive, you could also use an online service (I recommend Mozy and Carbonite for that purpose). The online services have the advantage of your backup being somewhere other than where the primary data resides. The downside is that it can be slower to recover if that needs to be done. There’s also a continuing cost.
One final note on backup. If you only have one copy of your data, it’s not a backup. Saving some files onto a CD and deleting them from your hard drive to save some space is just as risky as leaving them just on the hard drive. Don’t call your archive CDs a backup when they’re you’re only copy of something. Along these same lines, I never accuse someone of being too careful for wanting multiple backups. This is all based on your level of comfort and need to know your data will be there when needed. I even recommend that you have both a local backup on an external drive and utilize one of the online services for any data of yours which are most important.
I’ve been working on a package deal of a hard drive and setup. I’ll reveal that tomorrow and make it available for easy pre-purchase.