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Safegaurd your Data PDF Print E-mail
Vault How would you feel if someone stole your computer last night while you were sleeping or if you had a fire in your house?  What would you do? Would you be able to recover the information that you had on the computer?   

Believe it or not, computers today are becoming one of the most important parts of our life.  It is not the computer itself, but the information on the computer that makes it so important. Much too often I talk to someone whose computer crashed and they lost everything on their computer.  For some it is not so bad, for others it is devastating.  Once in a great while, I will meet someone whose computer crashed and they backed everything up.  They are the fortunate ones and they handle this crisis with ease.

Ask yourself the question at least once a month, “What would I do if I woke up and my computer was gone”.  Then back everything up that you wouldn’t want to lose and store it in a safe place out of your house (in case of a fire or theft).

Fortunately storage has come a long way in the last few years.  Storage mediums have gotten very large and the price has gotten very inexpensive.   Programs for effectively backing up your data have made it automatic and very easy.  Today the most common device for backing up your data and taking it with you is a USB Flash (Pen) drive.  These are about the size of a Bic lighter.  For very little money you can get a 1GB Flash Drive for around $20-$30 and a 4GB Flash drive is around $50-$60.  A 1GB Flash drive is sufficient for most people’s documents and data files.  

If you want to backup music files, pictures, and your email plus all of your other documents you are going need a much larger drive.  For this you will want an external USB hard drive.  These come in 2.5” and 3.5” sizes with capacities typically of 80GB to 500GB.  If you are going to take the drive with you the 2.5” drive is much more portable, but a bit more expensive than the 3.5” drive for the capacities and currently only have capacities of up to 250GB.  

Although we intend to backup on a regular basis, we are creatures of habit and often our data does not get backed up as frequently as it should.   Two of my favorite programs to solve this problem are Norton Ghost and Acronis True Image.  Acronis is actually a Burlington, MA company.  Both of these programs will allow you to schedule a backup of your hard drive as frequently as you want.  The backups will make an image of your hard drive and copy everything.  If your hard drive crashes, you can buy a brand new hard drive and restore your computer back to it’s condition at the time of the last backup within an hour.  If you get a virus or Windows gets corrupt, you can just restore  your computer to a time just before the issue and fix your problem.  The backup image also allows you to browse it like you would your C: drive and retrieve any individual file that you may need.

The main issue with backing up your computer to an external hard drive is that they usually are left right next to the computer that they are backing up.  Therefore, your backup will probably be destroyed if you have a fire, theft or flood in your house.   The best way to prevent a loss in these situations is to backup your data with an online data backup company.  With this solution your data will automatically be securely backed up in a remote location.  Prices for this service typically range from $5 to $30/month.  A few local companies that provide this service are connected.com, remotedatavault.net and carbonite.com.
 
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