Everybody has a story about computer failure. It’s an all consuming, blood-draining scramble to restore work from whatever backups that you may have cobbled together or a search for an insanely expensive hard drive recovery service. It’s not a pleasant experience and yet most people that I know don’t have any safety net in place, especially follow journalists and technical writers. Fortunately, there are cheap and easy options that make backing up a painless process. I’ve detailed a few here.
- You probably already have a removable USB thumb drive. They also make cheap and fairly expansive backup systems that can be set aside, away from any possible corruption or virus problems that may strike your computer. They come in a range of capacities from 2 to 32 gigabyte (GB) which is enough to store work files, a number of high definition movies and even a bootable partition that you can restore your operating system from. I recommend paying a little extra for a name brand manufacturer like SanDisk or Lexar for the reliability and faster data transfer rates.
- Spreading the risk of data loss across multiple drives is the best local option that you can do yourself. Just install additional internal hard drives or plug in external drives. You can then either manually drag and drop files that you want backed up to the new drive or use the basic backup/restore software that’s built into Windows or Mac OS. There are also third-party software solutions like Norton Ghost ($19), Rebit 5 ($24) or Data Backup for Mac ($39) that can be set to do regular automated backups. Most external drives also come with some kind of backup software. I do recommend committing the new drive to backup duty only to maximize service life. In fact, I turn off my external drive until I need to update the backup so as to isolate it from any problems my computers may have.
- If you have a decently fast Internet connection, cloud storage is an attractive and seamless option. Websites like Carbonite ($59/year for basic plan), CrashPlan ($50/year) and SugarSync (5 gb free; $24.99/month for 250 gb) allow you to install a client on your computer that will sync your data and upload backups to their remote servers. All three services work with both Mac and PC and will even allow you to share files across different computers. They do not, however, allow you to save your system files or applications so you won’t be able to restore your entire system.
Overall, it’s best not to rely completely on any single backup solution. A power surge, for example, can take out all of your hard drives in one dreadful instant. If you’re a professional that depends on your computer and data, its worth investing in at least two of the three mentioned solutions and mating that with decent virus protection to keep your main data and backups clean. Having all three has saved me on numerous occasions.
Image courtesy of kongsky / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
