How often do you backup your data?
by editor on Jul.28, 2010, under News
Why don’t people realize how important it is to backup their data? We have more and more data on our computers now, from thousands of photos through to our monthly budget spreadsheet, there is a lot of stuff we would hate to lose. Yet if you have a hard drive crash (unlikely but it does happen) or more likely you have a virus which comes in and messes up your system, then you could lose it all.
To backup you only need a simple external hard drive, you can get a 250GB one really cheap nowadays, and make sure you get one that is powered by your USB port so you don’t have extra leads to deal with. Of course once you have an external hard drive then you actually need to use it or you might as well have not bothered getting one. Setup a reminder on your phone, or if you have Outlook then do it in that, and get into the habit of backing up key files once a week so that if you do have a problem then you have a recent backup to fall back on.
Often the drives have backup software on them now which will only backup files which have been changed since you last backed up, which is a huge timesaver, or you can do a basic backup like me and just copy across the most important files on your computer each time. The price of USB flash drives has come down a lot recently, so in fact you could get a funky pink flash drive to backup your important files with if an external hard drive is too boring and bulky, that means you can carry it around with you too and have access to your files all the time.
