Wednesday 18 January 2012

Back-up your data before it's too late

It is always very important to back-up your data, whether it is to a device like a USB Flash Drive, a piece of software like Drop Box, or copying to CDs/DVDs.  It is amazing how many home and business clients do not back up their data, and when the inevitable machine crash happens, there is widespread panic.  It is one of things which requires only a few minutes in most cases but will causes huge headaches should you lose the data.  

Documents, music and pictures are the easiest to back up as you just need to copy the files to your required destination.  Programs and pieces of installed software are trickier to back up as you cannot just copy over MS Word for example to a flash drive, as this requires an installation where some files get copied to the system registry.

Popular modes of backup have been mentioned already, from USB flash drives to bigger capacity external hard drives (of which I keep most of my music and videos backed up on).  If you want the security of storing important pictures/documents/videos to somewhere other than on your person, than you could look at the possibility of copying your files to services which hold the files for you.  For photos and pictures you could upload your files to Picasa (now Web Albums from Google).  YouTube may be a solution to upload video content to.  And if you want to store your important documents away from your computer then you could upload them to a storage service like Drop Box, which stores all the relevant information on their servers, directly from a folder on your computer.  All you need here is a Drop Box account.

Of course with all services, there is a charge for bigger usage and storage space, but for most users the free service will be just fine.  

Here are the links to services if you do not wish to use conventional back-up devices like USB flash drives, CD/DVDs and external drives.

http://www.dropbox.com/ - Drop Box, store your files safely to Drop Box storage provider
http://picasa.google.com/ - Picasa Web albums
http://www.youtube.com/ - You Tube, upload your videos

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