Backup Your Backup

Backup Your Backup


If you didn't know by now, anything electrical or mechanical can fail. Hard drives and motherboards do fall into that category.

Why should I worry about this?

If either one of these (or both) fails you may have lost everything you worked so hard to get. Most people have a large amount of photos and/or videos or other valuable data stored on their hard drive. The biggest reason to do a backup is due to a computer crash or due to a catastrophic event. Other reasons are theft, vandalism, fire, tornado and many others.

How can I protect my files and/or Information?

You need to back everything up in some fashion. Many people use USB drives (also known as Thumb drives, backup drives or other names) By luck these now come in large storage sizes. I recommend buying a Cruzer thumb drive. The sizes go up to 32 GIG as of this writing. The advantage is that you can set a password using a special program that comes with the drive. General this is good protection.

Another choice

Another choice you do have now is cloud drives. Several companies now offer this option. Large size backup drives are available also. These have grown in storage size and can be at least 2 Terabyte. Some do have programs that will allow you to automatically backup your data. You could use an internal hard drive if you have a desktop computer. However, many people now have laptops and therefore this option is rarely used. USB drives have taken the market away from internal drives. They are very easy to install because you just plug them in.

Why You Need to Back up The Backup

As mentioned above, products can fail. Media such as USB drives can fail especially if they are cheap. Also, if you haven't removed the drive properly you may never be able to recover the information it contains. This could corrupt the data and therefore you will not be able to recover it. You should backup your data in at least two different places. Backing it up on a USB drive and taking it to a bank safety deposit box is one option. You can purchased two drives for this. They should be labeled so you know when you did the backup. Just swap them once per month. You can also backup data to a cloud drive. This is a real-time backup. This means you will not lose anything that you have saved. REMEMBER! If your USB drive does fail, your computer is now the backup. Be sure that you are covered in any case.

Recovery

Recovery of data and files will be much easier if you take time and effort to back them up and protect them. One backup should be kept offsite at all times in case of catastrophic failure, Disaster or other unexpected event.