Blog
FILE BACKUP
Posted on NOVEMBER 18, 2010 by MCHALFIN
Why should you make a backup? Simple, you never know when something devastating could occur to your computer. I've seen way too often somebody loose family photos or work and financial documents to a hardware failure. And it's not until then they realize how foolish they were to not take a few minutes to create a backup.
Where can you store your backup? Well, there's several different media that can be used. The size of the files you'll be backing up will somewhat dictate what media you'll use. Your backup can be saved to CD/DVD, a Flash drive, external hard drive, or a second internal hard drive. And depending on your setup maybe even a network drive on another computer.
What to backup you ask? Well, obviously that's pretty much up to you but in most cases photos and documents. But there are a few others to think about. How about e-mail and your internet favorites? Maybe even the drivers for your printer, scanner or video card. It all depends on what you think is important to you. How often you backup; daily, weekly, monthly all depends primarily on how often you use your computer, or better how often those important files change or get updated. There's a couple of different ways to backup your files. In most cases, just copying your files to the media you've chosen will work. You can also use a backup program that will automate most of this and allow you to set a schedule for it. Symantec, Acronis, and Nero are examples of companies that have backup software that can be purchased to help with this.
What you use, what you backup, and how often you backup is up to you. A computer's hard drive can fail anytime, can get virus, or somebody can just mess-up and delete things they really didn't mean to. Bottom-line, a backup should be done by everybody and it's certainly never a waste of time to ensure your valuable files are safe.