Stop for a moment and make a mental list of all the things that you have stored on your computer. Music? Family photos? Important documents and e-mail? Now, take another moment and imagine what sort of reaction you’d have if in 3 seconds, all that data were to disappear in a flash. Suddenly, every photograph that you didn’t print out is gone. Every track you purchased from iTunes is history. Your e-mail conversations are lost along with the spreadsheets you need for your business trip next week.
Why you should back up your data
If you use a computer, you must realize that this catastrophic situation is more likely to happen than you think. Let us count the ways that some or all of your data can vanish:
- Your hard drive becomes mechanically inoperable.
- A power surge fries your computer and wipes out your hard drive’s contents.
- A rain storm causes indoor flooding, of which your computer becomes a casualty.
- Your computer needs to be repaired by its manufacturer and the hard drive gets wiped in the process.
- Your mischevious nephew visits for Christmas, and formats your hard drive in the spirit of giving.
- A thief steals your computer.
Given any of these situations, would you prefer to cross your fingers and hope that an expensive data recovery service is able to restore a fraction of your lost data, or would you rather shrug off the situation and take 5 minutes to restore your data from backup?
How you can back up your data
In large organizations data is backed up often, with multiple copies kept in secure locations both on-site and off. If your computer contains a large, growing volume of data that is important enough to make you long for a backup scheme of similarly significant caliber, Lifehacker has a backup how-to that involves:
- Setting up an external hard drive to store backups.
- Using free software to back up data at nightly, weekly and monthly intervals.
- Optionally storing copies of your backups on an off-site FTP server.
If you want to tackle this setup, read Geek to Live: Automatically back up your hard drive at Lifehacker.
You may prefer an easier, more leisurley approach to backing up your data, and while they might not be as effective, casual backups are better than none. Here’s our zen list of tips for backing up your data:
- First and foremost, identify where all of your data is located. Modern operating systems give each user a “home directory” to store their files in. Windows XP has a folder called C:\Document and Settings\username that is home to My Documents, My Pictures, My Music, My Videos and many of your application settings. Mac OS X has a similar layout, with user files residing in /Users/username. If you are using a different operating system or have saved files elsewhere, make a list of all the locations where you have data.
- Purchase an external hard drive and copy all of your data to it at set intervals. Shoot for something like every other week, or at least once a month. If it takes a long time to copy over all of your data, start the backup process right before you go to sleep.
- Make sure the drive is large enough to hold all of your data and then some. If you don’t have an idea of how much disk space your personal data takes up, find out. In Windows, right-clicking on a folder and selecting Properties tells you the size of that folder. In Mac OS X, click once on the folder icon, then click File, then click Info.
- Every so often, make additional copies of your data on CD or DVD and store the discs in safe place. Put one copy in a fireproof safe at home, and another copy in a safe deposit box.
At face value, we might sound a little paranoid. Trust us when we say that a case like this is a prime example of being better safe than sorry. If you’re really not one to resist the temptation to procrastinate when it comes time to do a backup, go back and read that article on automatic hard drive backups we mentioned earlier. Just remember: it could happen.
[tags]backup,data[/tags]
