Data Backups
Data Backups - Why Bother?
For many people, computers have become a daily necessity. We
use them for work, for correspondence and for entertainment.
Many of the files are important documents and losing them
would cost us time and money. Backups are the best way to
prevent their permanent loss.
Don't make the mistake of believing that backups are only
for computer geeks or large corporations, or a task that can
be performed 'when I get around to it'. On the contrary,
backups are a necessity for everyone. Even if your computer
has been running reliably for years, it will fail one day -
either through virus attack, user error or just age.
On that day, one of two things will happen. You'll either
suffer the grief that comes with losing financial
information, passwords, music collections, personal
photographs and all the software you've purchased. Or, you
can repair or replace the computer and restore from the
backups you've been making regularly. The latter is an
annoyance, the first a disaster.
There are, unfortunately, an infinite variety of ways to
lose data. Besides hardware failure, computers can be
destroyed in fires or floods. Hard drives can be damaged by
power surges caused by lightning strikes or data lost by a
child randomly hitting the keyboard. Viruses can infect
systems and erase hard drives.
But there's only one way to get it back - by having it
available to be restored.
What to Backup?
For the average user, it's usually not necessary to backup
every file on the computer, which would require large
storage space. But at bare minimum home users should backup
personal files and irreplaceable software. Spreadsheets with
financial records not easily available from other sources,
legal documents, work-in-progress... the list is large.
But backups needn't be.
The easiest way to do backups is to use the backup software
that comes with the operating system. Windows has a free,
usable backup program while similar ones are available for
Mac, Linux and others. The software is easy to use and
backing up is a simple matter of selecting which folders to
backup. It even has a scheduler so backups can be automated
to occur at convenient times.
For a modest sum backup software can be purchased that will
only backup files changed since a certain date, or since the
last backup. Alternatively, new files could be copied daily
to a backup folder where they can be backed-up by your
backup program. To ease the task of identifying which, use
the Search option to list files 'newer than X'. Once the
list is complete, copy them into the backup folder and run
the program for just that folder.
Some data, such as e-mails are only slightly more difficult
to protect. Some e-mail clients can be configured to keep
copies of received and sent e-mails on the e-mail server.
When that's not an option, most can export messages to a
file, which can then be backed up.
Backups can be done to any kind of removable media -
writeable CD's/DVD's, removable hard drives or even the
newer 'keychain' devices that plug into a USB port. Even
floppy disks can still be used in many cases. Documents
often take a small amount of space. Just set aside 7 disks
and rotate them from week to week.
Daily backups are one more thing to do in a busy schedule.
But the day you lose that file you need and can't restore,
you're going to be a whole lot busier.
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