Tips

Backup Important Data
June 20, 2008
By Gabriel Estrada

When computers eventually crash what people are most concerned about is their huge collection of music, pictures of important events in their lives, their research paper that took several weeks to finish, their presentation due the next day and the list can go on several lines.

Yet even though it is the most valuable part of our computers - the data - we do nothing to prevent its future loss. We tend to have an optimistic attitude when it comes to the life of our computers, which causes us to take our data for granted. Save yourself from being a victim of data loss.....trust me it's no fun! There are really 2 things you need to start creating backups.

  1. The first is another storage device, such as an external hard drive or a USB flash drive. If you have many large files such as movies and music then you want to get an external usb hard drive of at least 500GB. If all you are backing up is office documents such as Word files, spreadsheets, or PDFs then an usb flash drive will probably be good enough and is much cheaper!
  2. The second is a program to do the work for you. Windows Vista does come with a built in Backup and Restore feature for home users which is faily easy to use. If you have an older version of Windows then you can try downloading a free backup program called ezback-it-up.

Well there you have it. Not much to it right? You can save yourself a couple hundred by doing it yourself instead of paying me to do it for you. Please email any questions to gabriel@intouchcs.com thank you.