Regular backups are VERY important
Save time and money if the worst happens
Imagine typing an important paper, clicking save, and closing your laptop. A couple of days later, when you get around to reopening the laptop, you find that at some point the hard drive crashed. Can you retype it? Is it due that day? Uh oh…
Or think about your pictures. Maybe you have baby pictures on your desktop computer that you view once in a while, thinking if they are on the computer they are safe forever. One day you go to show your son his first pictures and they can’t be found; You noticed your computer had crashed a few days earlier. (This is an actual repair that we worked on, it took 3 weeks to transfer the data to a hard drive that didn’t crash when accessed.)
I’ve encountered both of these and more on multiple occasions.
Personal example: One night I saved some website information on my Mac then went to bed. I woke up in the morning and the computer wouldn’t respond. I get a recovery drive and the hard drive won’t show in recovery mode and my motherboard gives me drive crash errors because it can’t mount the drive… But I had Time Machine (see below for Time Machine information) set up and I lost 0% of my data.
Rule of thumb, if you can’t stand to lose the picture or document, make sure it is backed up.
Save time and money, backup regularly
Operating Systems have backup utilities, Microsoft and Mac have Operating System based ones:
- Microsoft has a help page with a video devoted to how to use the backup program in Windows, which comes with your Operating System. In Windows 8 and 10 they renamed it file history.
- Mac has a utility called Time Machine, which pops up the first time you plug in an external hard drive.
- Linux is a different situation. If you happen to use Linux I might recommend Bacula, which is a tool suite that lets you manage backups for your personal computer and everyone on your network (if you’re the network admin). Though, if you use Linux it is probably best to find what works best for you. For standard users luckybackup feature rich and simple.
There are also Cloud methods of document backup:
- A Windows only tool, Office 365, is a paid subscription, that lets you upload your documents after you save them. Though I’ve never had someone request that.
- For Mac you can use iWork iCould backup. On your Mac if you’re signed in to iCloud you can configure it to upload a copy of your iWork documents to iCloud and keep the most recent available on any and all Macs and iOS devices you’re signed in with.
- Google Drive lets you drag and drop uploads, type new documents in their Docs application, or save to a location on your hard drive that gets mirrored to Google Drive. Google Drive also has a feature that lets you backup pictures and videos to their cloud. You get unlimited storage if your media fits the following criteria:
Overwhelmed? Give us a call and we can help you set up a plan that works for you!
Whats the worst that could happen?
We do offer data recovery services but these can be time consuming and costly. After a certain type of hard drive crash, known as a “head crash”, an after-market disc platter for the drive is required to get the data. For this you’d be looking at a minimum of $400 to recover your data. Makes the $60 to $110 for a backup drive you’d get seem cheaper doesn’t it? Also no need to keep the drives plugged in, Time Machine does hourly backups but they all will remind you if it’s been more than a week since your last backup.