I can’t impress to you enough how important it is to back up your data.
Data is any information that is on your computer, smartphone, or tablet. Specifically, you want to back up any information that is important to you — information that if lost could not be replaced.
Imagine what would happen if your computer crashed, your house burned down, your office is flooded, there is a power surge due to any natural disaster …
What would you do if you lost all your memories? Those pictures of your children when they were just kids, tomorrow’s homework, a love letter (email) from your sweetie, the tax documents you’ve been working on for weeks, pictures or videos of the kids in their first school performance? You get the idea.
There are three types of backups:
1) Partition
2) Local
3) Off-site
A partition backup is just a backup to a special portion of the hard drive on your computer. This backup is useful for some crashes and protects against some changes, such as accidentally deleted files or unintended changes. However, a partition backup is of very limited use. If your computer’s hard drive crashes your data is lost!
A local backup is to another drive, usually an external drive or another computer. Many external hard drives, such as those from Western Digital, come with special backup software. Apple’s computers come with Time Machine built in, which does an auto-backup and keeps a rolling history, as long as space allows. It back’s up to an external hard drive that is connected to your computer using the USB port. You need to follow the specific instructions for your system to ensure the backup is working properly. A local back up is great because it protects against computer drive crashes. If anything happens to your computer and it stops working, which usually happens very unexpectedly, you will still have your important information available to you that you can access with another/new computer.
An off-site backup is where the data is stored somewhere that is completely different from your computer. So if your computer is in your home the back up is somewhere away from your home. This type of backup usually requires an external service, such as Carbonite.com. This type of backup is usually a slow speed back up over your ISP (Internet Service Provider) connection. This form of backup is very useful. Imagine what would happen if your home or office burned down. Both your computer and it’s external hard drive could be lost due to either the heat or the water used to put out the fire. When choosing a service make sure they have multiple sites and guarantee your data’s security. A side benefit of an off-site backup is that you can usually access the files you need when you are away from your computer, even if your computer is turned off.
NOTE: You can get some of the benefits of an offsite backup by storing the external hard drive used as your local backup to a site that is offsite, either a safe deposit box at a bank, your home (from your office) each night, or your office (from your home) each day, etc …
Remember, your smartphone and tablet, iPhone, iPad, Android are small computers. They should be backed up regularly too! You can back them up to your computer or to the “Cloud”.
Don’t get caught by surprise – BACKUP!!
Cheers,
Richard – The iTechTutor
