Back up Back up Back up
I cannot stress the importance of this topic enough. Just this week I have seen two machines come in to us with non booting hard drives. One of the drives only had two weeks of graphic work on it. Yes the chap was annoyed that it had failed and resigned himself to working overtime for the next month. This was not catastrophic and only cost him about 120 hours of extra work. He hopes his customers understand when he has to tell them their jobs are going to be late.
The other hard drive was from a dropped laptop. The owner had not backed up his family photos from the last two years. The photos included pictures of his children. He was devastated that they had been lost. No amount of overtime will ever replace those memories.
Backing up is a very easy task and can be done a number of ways. Most computers have a DVD or CD writer installed. If you need to back up your documents, then this is by far the cheapest and easiest way to do it. A CD will take 780 MB of data while a DVD will take 4.7 GB. If your data is important, I advise taking a back up now and storing it in a safe place AWAY from your computer and in a cool dry environment away from sunlight. Make sure you use writable only discs as these cannot be overwritten. I would recommend this to be done at least once a month.
In between full document back up it is a good idea to run an incremental back up. These are the files that have changed since your last full backup. An easy way to do this is to invest in a USB memory stick. These cheap items are like mini hard disks and are over writable. They come in sizes from 512 MB up to 32 GB.
If you have a very large amount of data than you need to look into removable hard drives or other forms of mass back up. USB hard drives cost very little per MB but are over writable and more prone to damage than USB memory sticks or optical media.
The one thing that most people don’t remember to back up are their E-Mail files. Most people use outlook express (windows mail in Vista) or Outlook. The files with all of your E-Mails on are hidden. To find these files you need to have access to your Local folder in documents and settings. To do this in XP, right click on start and go to explore, under tools choose Folder Options. Under view choose View all files.
You are now able to explore your local folder and back up either your outlook express folder or your outlook folder
Please remember that if your computer has crashed and your supplier suggests a reload, this will destroy any data on your hard drive. Before reloading, save your data. If you can’t do this then call us and let us save it for you.
Add comment August 2nd, 2008
