Do you have a bunch of precious digital photos sitting on your hard drive? Maybe some important school papers that you might need in the future? If they are all sitting on a single hard drive, you’re putting yourself in SERIOUS danger. Hard drives can die in an instant, and everything you have can be lost. That means you need to constantly back-up your data. Here are a few ways to do that from cheap to more expensive, each with some pros and cons.
1) Burn to DVD
This is a really cheap method. You can buy excellent Taiyo-Yuden DVD+Rs for about $0.36 a piece. They hold a ton of data if you’re talking pictures, mp3s, or document files. If you want to get serious about your backing up, I’d also make sure you buy a good burner, like this samsung burner. After you’ve burned all your precious data, I would also make sure that you actually burned a good DVD. Sometimes because of either the media, the burner, or software, not every burn is a quality burn. For this I would use Nero Disc Speed. It’s a little more complicated for the average person, so if you’re using a program like Nero to burn things, check the “verify” button while it’s burning, then when it’s done it will read the DVD and make sure everything burned successfuly. Disc Speed does the same thing basically, but much more in-depth.
The problem with backing up to disc is that it’s not automatic. If you only back up to disc once a month, that means there is a chance you could lose an entire month of data/pictures/etc. And while DVDs are fairly reliable, they can become unreadable over time (hopefully if you take the steps I said above, good burner, good media, good verification, then this shouldn’t be a problem). To address these downfalls we have method 2.
2) Back-up to an External Hard Drive
This is a really easy method for the average person. Instead of backing up your information to a disc, now we’re going to back-up to a second hard drive. The key of course is something called “redundancy.” You want your valuable data to always exist in at least 2 places. Then if one place dies, you have your data somewhere else. Storing you stuff on 2 hard drives means that if one dies, you’ll have a chance to back-up before the 2nd one dies (which of course would be unlikely).
This can be done on the cheap with something like this. All you have to do is plug it in, and it should show up as a USB device, ready for all your files. Of course make sure you copy your files over, don’t move them. We want everything in two places. If you’re feeling adventureous you can make your own external hard drive. I love this AMS Venus external enclosure, and you can couple that with a good SATA hard drive. This gives you a little more flexibility that some of the pre-made external hard drives don’t. If you don’t want to go external of course you can just put another hard drive in your computer.
Once you have the 2nd hard drive though, you need to make back-ups automated. If you simply copy stuff to another hard drive once a month like you did with the DVD method, you still run the risk of losing something. Some of the external drives come with their own backup software, but personally I like one called Backup4all. The standard version will suit most people’s needs. You can easily setup which folders and files you want backed up and to what 2nd hard drive. You can tell it to back-up every single day at a time you’re not using the computer. If you leave it on all night, it can do it at 2 am. If you leave it on during the day, it can back-up at noon. The best part is that once you put new pictures or files on your computer, within 24 hours it will be safely in two places.
3) Raid Configuration
This is super geeky, but I thought I’d mention it since I just delved into this myself. Raid comes in many different varieties, but for what we’re talking about I’ll only mention Raid 1: Mirrored. What it does is take two hard drives, and it puts the exact same stuff on both. Right now in Windows I have a drive F: called Raid that is 500gb big, but in reality it is TWO 500gb drives inside my machine. Everything on that drive is instantly redundant. If one of them dies, I don’t lose all the data because it is backed up on the second drive. This is by far the most expensive and nerdy of the three methods, but just wanted you to know it exists.
So there you go. Get that data backed up and stop worrying about losing all your precious data!