In this post I thought I would look at data backup. I know it’s boring no one likes doing backups. But they are essential, computers are relatively cheap you can even buy one at Tesco. The value of your computer is in the data, your data. Your documents, your music and most importantly your pictures.
Holiday Snap
Think about it, what would you do if suddenly all your pictures stored on your computer vanished, you can always rewrite that document, download those music tracks but you cannot go back to that two year olds party or the really good holiday in 2007. Pictures are snapshots in time and in this modern day of digital cameras how many of us bother to print them off?
So you need to do backups, but what you really need is a simple reliable way of doing them. There are many online backup solutions but they are costly, I don’t mean initially but the cost will continue over years and will only go up as the amount of data space used increases. Pictures take up space and that leads to another problem, with a large amount of backup space online is when (not if) you
need to recover your pictures and other data. A few years of backups can be a significant amount of space getting that back all at once onto your new PC may not be possible via a download. You are then faced with paying the backup company to copy your data onto some form of hard drive and sending it back to you.
What are the alternatives?
A portable hard drive and a piece of backup software. This I think is the best solution. A large USB portable Hard Drive would cost well under £100 and the software can be free. One hardware cost, setup the software and then just remember run the backups. You may laugh but I know of at least one client of mine that had bought the USB hard drive but “just not got around to setting it up” when their hard drive crashed and she faced a bill of £1000 to send her drive to a specialist data recovery laboratory in Amsterdam to get het data back! Surprisingly this cost seems to be about average for this type of recovery, and even they cannot guarantee to get back everything.
USB External Hard Drive
Once you have purchased the USB hard drive and installed the software the MOST important backup is the first one. That is the one that will take the time and once you have one backup at least you will never lose everything. Personally I would still use the online backup system but only as a backup to my own backups (you can never have too many backups). Most USB hard drives come with a bit of free software for backups, but if you need some free reliable software for your backups contact me and I will give you a copy of the free software I use.
UPDATE 13/05/2012
I recommended that a USB backup drive should be used. Well technology moves on but not necessarily better. There is now a range of USB drives you need to avoid. These drives make a big thing about security and they encrypt everything on the drive. All well and good you may think, but what happens if it goes wrong? I had a customer bring one in for a data retrieval. Should have been easy, whip the drive out put it in a PC recover the data. Ah BUT the drive is encrypted, and it turns out the encryption is specific to the drive. Even taking the drive and putting it in a new identical USB drive case will not get back your data. So avoid any drive that has encryption, unless you are prepared to spend thousands trying to get your data back, or just lose the lot, but then why bother buying a backup device.
An example of one of these drives would be the “WD My Passport Essential”.
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