Last time I talked about storage drives – Hard Disk drives and Solid State drives where your files, photos, music and operating system are kept. We all know that these will both fail at some stage so it’s vital to have all this stuff on a separate backup. Viruses and ransomware can also enter your computer from internet browsing and email and turn all your files into illegible garbage. If you have a good backup then you won’t need to worry but if you have a poor backup or no backup, then sadly everything on your computer may be gone – forever.
So how do you back up? There are several ways – some are better than others but something is better than nothing.
- Dropbox and One Drive – not really backups because if a virus gets onto your computer then it gets into these files as well but it can save you from a failed hard drive
- External Hard drive backup – this is the traditional plug in method but it’s manual and time consuming. Its main weakness is how often you backup. The longer the time between backups, the more stuff you’re at risk of losing.
- On-line (cloud) Automated Back Up – this is the new standard. Your files are copied to a data centre and kept in a format that no-one can read. It backs up everyday and it can’t be corrupted. When your computer fails, get another one and bring back all your files from ‘the cloud’. It’s the fullest protection we have.
Backing up is one of the fundamental ways to save you a lot of future heartache. If you’d like to know more, drop me a line at cbeentjes@needanerd.co.nz
Happy computing
Carl