You should always backup your important data.
The most anxious phone calls I receive are from people who think they may have lost precious files. This
might be your email and contacts, business financial records, but more commonly it seems to be the family
photographs. Many people seem to recognise the value of the data whilst not doing anything about safe
guarding it.
Your data is normally stored on your computers hard disk drive. It typically spins full circle between 70
& 160 times every second using a read/write head that “floats” about one ten thousandth of the thickness
of a single human hair from the surface. If they ever touch you can generally wave goodbye to some or
even all of your data. It’s a wonder they work at all but in reality they are usually very reliable.
However do you want to trust your data to one and only one disk?
This is why should always keep backups of your data, particularly as some failures are very expensive or
in rare cases impossible to fix. There are many ways to backup your data and it does not have to be a
major chore if it has been setup properly in the first place. When considering your backup options you should
consider the volume of data, the importance of the data and the rate the data changes.
If your data is small but rapidly changing business data then you should save multiple copies of your data to
multiple backup destinations (eg. you might rotate through a daily backup device for each day of the week and
hence if you discover a problem you can revert to any day in the last week). You could use multiple USB sticks
to save your data. If you have more data you could save a full copy to DVD each week and just save changes
each day - this is usually known as incremental backup.
Many home users are particularly interested in preserving their family photographic & video collection. For this
sort of backup the data changes infrequently but there is often a huge amount of it. The simplest solutions here
involve external USB disk drives that mirror your data on your internal hard drive.
In all cases you should consider a third copy, preferably stored at different premises (fire, water & theft risks)
or at the very least be ready to replace a faulty storage system immediately you discover a fault. Note this means
you should not only consider the integrity of your main disk but also any backups you have already made.
Your data can be saved amongst other options to:
- Another hard disk (easy to use, good size but still mechanical)
- Optical disks (Little harder to use, very good for off-site, you can just use more disks as you need more space)
- Memory stick (cheap if you don't need many, easy to use but small storage space)
- Online (some broadband providers provide some free space as do some photo printing sites)
- Paper! (make sure you check the permanence of the ink particularly inkjets)
Avoid unbranded optical media and use standard formats to store your data. You might consider encryption for sensitive
data and compression to save space although both can lead to less recoverable data in the event of a problem in your
backup data.
All the options have their benefits and problems but you should definitely be doing at least one if you value your data at all.