BlueMoon Solutions
"for all your home and business computer needs" Why Are Backups Important – And What Do I Need?
Why Are Backups Important – And What Do I Need?
I am regularly asked about how to take backups, I guess it’s something that we all know we should do but it’s one of those things that we never really get around to doing. The long and the short of it is if you don’t have your important data in two or more places then you don’t really have it at all. I’m not scared mongering here, it’s not unusual for computer hard drives to simply fail, for them to become corrupted or infected by a virus or for a computer to be stolen. Now, while I would wish this on none of you, I do see it happening to people up and down the Costa on a daily basis and most of them unfortunately have not taken the time to do a backup.
There are several methods through which you can easily protect your important data by backing it up, you can copy it to a CD or DVD (although a single disk will likely not hold all of your data if you have more than a modest picture or music collection). A better and more flexible solution would be to buy one, or more, memory sticks (these are pretty cheap now with a 16Gb (equal to around 23 cd’s) stick at less than 40 euros.
Once you have copied your important information onto the stick you could put it away in the safe or some other protected place for safe keeping. If a memory stick is not large enough then the next best thing would be to back up onto an external hard drive, this will set you back around 100 works and should be more than sufficient in terms of storage for anything that you need to back up.
Of course the downside to all of these methods of backups are that they rely on you, the fallible human, to take the decision to actually perform the backup and the law of sod states that this decision will be made the day AFTER your computer and all it’s precious data has died!
So that brings us onto automated backups, this is something that BlueMoon offer their business customers as a fully automated and monitored solution, but for most of us non-business types, some sort of online solution is sufficient and there are loads of options available at the end of a google search, most of them, like www.dropbox.com offer a free amount of storage with the option to upgrade for a modest monthly fee, dropbox in particular I like because it synchronises your backed up data with all of your online devices (mine is copied from my PC to my laptop, my iPhone and my iPad, just for good measure and even if I were deprived of all of these devices it would still be available online at their website!)
So, don’t delay, use this weekend to ensure that your data is protected and save yourself from losing those precious photo’s that you would never get back again if the worst were to happen!
