Backup backup backup
The three most important things you can do to save your sanity when it comes to computers are backup, backup and backup.
Why? Because there are a great number of things, that can happen to your computer and your precious data (documents/pictures/videos/preferences/settings etc).
Here is a partial list of common and less common causes for computer data disasters:
- Power outages and power surges
- lightning
- Hard drive failures
- Viruses and other Malware.
- Accidentally deleting your files
- Accidentally pushing the power/reset switch
- Accidentally pulling the power cord
- Kids and Pets
- Mud balls (Personal experience)
- Stretching (Other people's experience)
It is a statistical inevitability that one day you will experience a backup related emergency and I am talking from 20+ years of experience with hundreds of computer users including myself.
From my experience most computer users fall into 1 of 2 categories:
- Users who don't backup enough.
- Users who don't backup at all.
We all make excuses to justify this irrational behavior.
Here are some of the common things I've heard from myself and other people over the years:
- "It would never happen to me" (i.e. I'm lucky)
- "I will backup later" (i.e. I'm lazy)
- "I only backup on special occasions" (i.e. I'm lazy and unrealistic)
- "I can easily retype/reconstruct that data from memory "(i.e. I'm lazy, unrealistic and have a great memory)
What ever your excuse is, I hope that you are reading this article before you experience your first major data disaster.
It is interesting to note that most people will not start to backup until they experience such an event. Some people would even require a few major disasters to actually start backing up their important things.
I hope that some of the people reading this article will decide to save themselves the agony and backup as soon they finish reading this. Actually, forget about finishing the article, do it I right now!
What, you're still reading this?
Since you are reading this I guess there are 3 probable reasons:
- You are not convinced that there is a real need to backup.
- You already know and backed up everything that needs to be backed up.
- You don't know how to backup or you not sure what needs to be backed up.
If your reason was 1 or 2, you don't need to read the rest of this article.
If your reason was 3, read on…
A simple what to and how to backup guide
What needs to be backed up?
The things that need to be backed up can roughly be divided in to 3 groups in order of importance:
- Personal (user) files/documents/pictures/videos etc.
- General software and settings related files.
- Operating system files.
The safest thing to do is to backup all your hard disk contents but since this is not practical in most cases because of size limitations (typical disk sizes today can reach many Giga Bytes of data which far exceeds common backup media types such as CD's/DVD's etc) you should at least backup the things that are most important. So before backing up we need to find the files and locations that important data is stored at.
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