All hard drives can fail. If a hard drive fails, recovering data is unlikely and expensive. So having a back up of the important data in your computer is essential, particularly those which are irreplaceable such as family photos or work documents.
How do I backup my data?
Most common devices used for a backup are:
- External Hard Drives are great for general use. You can use them over and over again, they usually have quite a lot of space, and they are good for backing up large amounts of data. Remember that external hard drives can fail too so make sure you keep the copy on your computer.
- CD’s and DVD’s are also good mediums for backing up data, and are reasonably cheap if you just want to backup a few things like your photo collection, music and documents.
- USB Flash Drives are great ways of storing small amounts of data, like work documents, etc.
A Backup is essentially just a copy of the data you backup, so the simplest way of backing up is just copying the data and pasting it in the device you want to backup to. There is also software that will do this for you automatically. (more…)