They say that there are two types of people in this world - those who back up their data regularly, and those who’ve not yet lost anything important due to misconfiguration, mistakes, or hardware failure.
This week I was asked to help somebody whose hard drive failed, they had a ton of pictures that were important to them. The drive was dead - no luck. The only way that they can possibly get their data back now would be to send it to a data recovery place.
Backing up is not a hard thing to do, all it really involves is copying important files to a device that’s not always attached to your computer. Here’s what I recommend (for home users):
- Don’t get yourself into a situation where you cannot re-install the operating system on your computer. This means to keep the operating system install discs, any program installation disc, or to know how to download any software to install again (and don’t pirate software, that’s just wrong).
- Buy an external USB drive. The only one that I would buy for myself is a LaCie.
- Once every week (on a schedule), copy documents, pictures, Quicken files, etc to this hard drive.
- Take the hard drive somewhere safe, such as your workplace or a firebox.
- Be comfortable that your protected against fire, drive failure, or accidentally erasing your data.
This is simplified, but the point is if you have any data that is important to you you should never have it stored in one place.