Simple Backups

With more and more family pictures, and the sentimental moments they represent, being held on digital media (hard drives, flash drives, etc.) it is so important for you to create, keep, and maintain backups of these files.  Data recovery without backups is; when even possible, time consuming, stressful to both the technician performing the operation and the waiting owner, and expensive!  In this post we are going to explore some really simple and effective means of backing up the things you don’t want to lose.

I want to first talk about “backup” programs.  The reality is that they do work well, but only if you are very experienced at using them.  They can be complex and cumbersome and come with a lot of pitfalls that the average user may not be aware of.  Remember a backup program is only effective if you have the know-how to actually use it to restore your files.  In this installment I will be staying away from “backup programs” as such and just discussing simple and easy ways to keep your precious files safe from harm.

Lets look at “external hard drives”.  There is a possibility that your computer hard drive can simply fail.  It is an electro-mechanical device spinning at high speed and will one day die.  As a result of this we need a safe place to back our files up to.  This place must be physically different than the internal hard drive where your desired files are stored.  External hard drives are a good, simple item for this task.  Though they too can fail, the chances of it failing at the same time as your internal drive are slim.  At the time of writing this a 1TB external, USB connected external hard drive costs about $50 - $80. 

The external hard drive is seen by your computer as simply another local drive.  You simply plug in the drive with the provided USB cable to your computer and plug in the power cable if necessary.  You may run into a situation at this point where the computer wants to “format” the drive.  Go ahead and do this if the drive is empty (it’s what allows your computer to read the disk).  Be aware that anything on the drive at this time will be deleted.  Now you can simply manually “copy and paste” the files you wish to save from their existing location to the new drive for safe keeping.  Be sure to “copy and paste” not “cut and paste” (this moves the file without creating the duplicate).  You, in the case of Windows, can also “drag” the file over.  Windows will create a duplicate when a file is dragged across multiple drives. 

Online file storage is another option to create functional backups of your files.  This is easy and can be done a couple ways.  The simplest is to upload your photos and organize them using your favorite social networking site or a “Cloud” site like “iCloud” or “Dropbox”.  The benefit to this is that the files can be accessed from literally any internet ready machine.  The caveat here is to mind your security settings and, as always, use good passwords.

Backups overall are really quite a simple concept.  You merely create a direct duplicate of the file you want to protect on a second physical medium.  This ensures that, in the case of a computer failure, your important files can easily be accessed from another machine and remain in tact. 

See You Out There