Imagine all of your important documents, pictures, music all gone. Many people don’t realize the importance of data backups because it’s usually hard to conceive loosing all of your important files until it actually happens.

Good News! There are several things that you can do to keep your important data safe. I have listed a few of these methods below.

Copy to an external source:

An external source could be a CD or DVD, it could be an external hard drive, or it could be a usb drive .

This method only requires that drag and drop your files from their current location to the external drive (for an external hard drive or usb drive) or use CD/DVD burning software to burn the files on to optical media (CD’s and DVD’s).

Use imaging software:

This software is used to take a “snap-shot” of your system. It will make a replicated copy of your entire hard drive or specific folders and in most cases, automatically save the image to a location specified by you (preferably on one of the external sources named above).

I’m not going to get into the different types of imaging software in this post because I would prefer to give you an in-depth review of individual pieces of software. For this post, I just want to make sure that you are aware of the existence of imaging software.

Setup RAID:

There are several different types of RAID, but for the purposes of this post we will only be discussing RAID level 1. The Wikipedia definition of RAID is :

RAID — which stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Drives (as named by the inventor) or Redundant Array of Independent Disks (a name which later developed within the computing industry) — is a technology that employs the simultaneous use of two or more hard disk drives to achieve greater levels of performance, reliability, and/or larger data volume sizes.

RAID 1 is basically two or more hard drives, setup to create a mirror of each other. When looking at this on the computer it will only appear that you have one hard drive, however there are two hard drives that are exact replicas. This way if one hard drive ever dies you have all the information automatically saved, on the fly, to the other hard drive. Even with RAID setup, other forms of backup are still a good idea.

Use an online backup service:

Companies such as carbonite.com can be used to back up your data, securely online. I have never used any of these services (including carbonite) so I cannot atest to which one is the best. These companies generally have their own software that you install on your computer and all the different types of software will have their own configuration settings in which you can decide what gets backed up to the services secure site across the internet.

The most important thing to verify with these companies is that you are sending your data through encrypted channels. And it would also be good to know what their license agreement is with you (Do they really gaurantee your data will not be lost on their servers? What do you get if something happens to your data?).

Backups are even more important for the self employed or business owners. We all know how important those customer lists and book keeping records are. However, backing up is not just limited to business anymore. So backup your data now before it’s gone forever.

If you live in the North Atlanta area and think you might already have hard drive issues or would like to speak to a professional about the right back-up solution for you, contact us and speak with a Gigasphere Geek today.