- by Marianne Van der Wel
Do you store important items on your computer such as your photos, music, tax documents or a favourite program? How would you feel if you lost any of these? Having lost two computers due to hardware failure 10 months apart, in the last 1.5 years, I REALLY appreciate having backups! Performing backups is easier and cheaper than ever.
- Determine what data you do not want to lose (e.g. photos, documents that you have no desire to recreate, vital business documents). This is usually your "My Documents", "My Pictures" and “My Music”, as well as your "Desktop" folder and possibly your "Downloads" folder.
- Determine how much disk space these folder use.
- Buy an external disk that will fit your current and future needs. Allow room for growth. You have 3 basic choices:
- A flash memory stick with 64 Gigabytes (GB) costs $160-$200; 32GB around $90; 16GB approximately $45 and 8GB around $30
- An external portable disk drive. These do not require an external power source and plug into a USB port with a cable. A 250GB device with the required USB cable can cost $85-$110
- A regular external hard drive. These also plug into a USB port with a cable but are generally little larger in physical size and do need a separate power supply. These drives cost $80-$150 for 500GB to 1000GB (one terabyte).
To actually perform the backups, there are many options besides your operating system utilities. Some external disks come with software that allows you to automatically back up your files as you create them. There is also free software that allows you to synchronize folders, even whole drives, and schedule the backups automatically. One is SyncBack.
If you prefer not to use a backup utility, you can use your copy command to transfer files to an external device.
Note that local email programs such as Outlook Express and Thunderbird use special databases and hence are generally not backed up and recovered using standard backup techniques. For Thunderbird, there is Moz Backup (my personal favourite!).
