If you are like most people, you’ve probably already given up on your New Year’s resolutions of going to the gym every day and ending your addiction to snack foods. Why not replace these resolutions with something more practical and less exhausting? Resolve to back up your data.
Only a few years ago, it was common to have countless dusty boxes of snap shots from family vacations, graduations and first steps or if you ran a business invoices, contracts and expense reports. Those days are essentially over. Our priceless moments in time, music, favorite recipes and financial details have all gone digital. Storing these things in zeroes and ones instead of in countless boxes seems better. However, there are risks – hard drives fail, viruses and other malware can slip in and wreak havoc of data and files can be accidentally deleted. However, it is possible to minimize the risk of some important piece of personal or professional information being destroyed – consistently back up your data.
Creating a data backup does not have to be a complex, time consuming endeavor. It’s definitely far less time consuming, frustrating, complex and costly than trying to recover a file. There are also multiple storage options, which allows you to pick the solution that best fits your unique needs.
- External hard drive – External hard drives, as the name suggests, are external storage device for your computer. External hard drives tend to have large storage capacities and can connect to a computer via USB or Firewire, but can be bulkier to transport than other external storage choices. If you use Windows, you can configure the operating to system automatically backup your files at regular interval to an external hard drive. A similar feature, Time Machine, exists for Apple users.
- Flash drive – Flash drives are small, inexpensive storage devices that come in a variety of shapes and storage capacities. They typically connect to a computer via USB and are excellent option for backing up or transporting small to medium amounts of data among machines.
- SD card – Secure digital (SD) cards are small, hot swappable storage device typically used in cameras and mobile devices. Although SD cards were not originally intended as a mechanism for general computing storage, many modern laptops and desktops include an SD slot, which makes the cards an option for backing up data. SD cards have theoretical storage limit of 2TB, but cards above 32GB are rarely commonly available. In additional to traditional SD cards, you can also use an EyeFi SD card, which have built in Wi-Fi.
- Cloud storage – In the last few years, several personal cloud services have emerged. From Apple to DropBox, multiple options exists for storing your data without keeping up with another device. In addition to multi-purpose cloud storage, specific backup solutions like Handy Backup, Carbonite and SugarSync can automate the backup of your data to the cloud.
Given the multitude of options of available, you should be backing up your data. If you’ve already experienced the nightmare of losing valuable data or need additional help RBG Computer Solutions has deep expertise in data recovery. We have 97% success rate in recovering data lost from operating system crashes, damaged hard drives, deleted files, reformatted drives, corruption from power surges and other catastrophic events.