Back Up Your Computer All the Time

In the digital world we all have things on our computers that we don't want to lose. But the most common thing I do after virus removals in my business is to recover data from dead computers. And if the customer had kept good, backups then they would not have needed help in the first place or would have paid much less then they do most of the time due to the fact that the customer did not have a good backup of their important data.

Two steps, done on a regular bias will keep you and your data happy no matter what happens to your current computer system.

The easy steps to follow are...

1. get a external USB hard drive.
These are dirt cheap today and you can get them at Walmart or any office store in your city.

2. At least every week do a "raw copy" of your important data to the external drive.
All you need to do this is go to "My Computer" find the external drive. Then create a new folder and name it with the date and what your going to copy into it. Then just "drag and drop" the files you want to save into that folder. So if you had invoices from that week you would name the folder something like... "1-12-2010 invoices" This way you know when you made the backup and what is in it.

Now many will claim this is too hard and that there is a ton of software that can make the backups for you. And that may be true to a degree but the main reason I recommend a good old drag and drop backup is because I can not tell you how many times I have arrived at a clients place and been told that "we make backups all the time" just to find out the software they are using to do this failed two years ago and nobody noticed. Or the software they were using does not work on whatever the new version of Windows is at the time and can't be restored to a new machine.

So while I do not mind people running backup software (you can never have too many backups) I still think it's vital to have these "old style" backups being made just to make sure your safe and that what you need to get backed up is in fact getting backed up.

You take your car in for an oil change a few times a year and I bet you see the doctor from time to time. In today's world backing up your data is just one more thing you should be keeping tabs on. If you backup on a regular bias then when your computer has problems (they all get problems) you will not have to go through the nightmare of trying to rebuild or find thousands of files you may not even know at this time you need.

So Backup, backup and backup!

You will never regret it.