Why
You Need to Back Up Your Data
My uncle’s computer had just
celebrated its 10th birthday. I warned him he needed to start backing up his
stuff and so he promptly went to the store and purchased a brand new hard
drive. There his purchase sat, collecting dust for months and months. Then one
day I received a frantic call from him saying “my computer won’t start!” After
a quick inspection, I concluded that his hard drive had finally crashed. Of
course, because he had not backed up his computer, he lost hours of family
videos, hundreds of financial spreadsheets, and irreplaceable family
photos.
Unfortunately, there are many people
out there just like my uncle, and the goal of this podcast is to make sure that
you aren’t one of them!
Basic
Computer Lingo
Before I get started telling you
exactly how to back up your data, I want to briefly define some lingo that you
should be familiar with:
Hard drive: A piece of computer equipment that holds all of your files,
such as pictures, video, music, documents, and pretty much anything else. It’s
measured in Gigabytes or Megabytes.
Megabyte/Gigabyte: A megabyte can be loosely defined as the amount of space a
particular item takes up on the hard drive and a gigabyte is equal to 1,000
megabytes.
How
to Back Up Your Data
So how exactly do you back up your
stuff? Well, you have a few options:
External drive: You can buy an external drive, which is a hard drive
that you connect to your computer by a USB cord.
Internet: Another option is to back up your data on the Internet,
also known as “the cloud.” Unlike buying an external drive, this option is
oftentimes free and requires no extra hardware. Websites such as Mozy will
guide you through this process step by step, and it’s normally very painless.
There are other options you can use
(internal hard drive, DVDs, RAID), but they are more involved and I don’t
suggest you use them unless you’ve got advanced computer skills.
What’s
the Best Way to Back Up Your Data?
Option
1: The Cloud
For the average computer user who
needs to back up less than 5 gigabytes, I would strongly recommend Windows Live Mesh, which is a “cloud” based
solution, meaning all of your data is stored securely on the Internet in a
Microsoft Data Center. Windows Live Mesh is free and works on Windows as well
as Macs.
The benefits of this solution are
that it is free, easy, and the safest way to store your files. After initial
setup, every time you make a change to a file, it is automatically updated and
backed up without you having to do a single thing. The only downside is that
you have to take about 30 seconds or so to sign up for an account.
Option 2: Hard Drive
But let’s say backing up to the
Internet isn’t for you. Whether it’s because you don’t trust your data online,
or you just have too many gigabytes of data, there is another option. And
that’s to purchase an external hard drive available at any computer store.
Backup hard drives range from $50 to $100, but before you groan, just ask
yourself whether you would be willing to pay $50 for all of your files to be
safe. I’d bet on it.
Once you read all the information
that came with your external hard drive, you can plug it in and most computers
will recognize the drive automatically and prompt you from there—it’s pretty
easy. I’ll discuss more on using hard drives in a future episode.
Quick
and Dirty Tips for Backing Up Computer Data
1. Have your data set to back up at
least once a week (if not daily)
2. Keep at least two copies of your
data, each on a different hard drive (or one on the Internet).
3. When your external hard drive
isn’t connected to your computer when backing up, keep it in safe place in case
of some sort of natural disaster, such as a fire or flood.
4. If possible, I strongly recommend
backing up your data to The Cloud.
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