Backing up Your Computer Is a Good Idea—Trust Me

If your computer were to crash, either by hardware failure or virus, all of your data could be lost… especially if you’ve never backed it up. Almost everyone can relate to writing a homework paper, only to lose it with no means of recovery available. In some cases, it could cost you a lot of money to recover data from a crashed hard drive.

Trust me when I say that this is the most disheartening work I have performed with regards to fixing computers.  Telling someone that they have lost everything on their computer is not easy. Baby pictures. Wedding photos. Business documents. All gone.

Now that I have you scared about your computer crashing, take a deep breath. The light at the end of the tunnel is NOT an oncoming train!

Have you ever stopped to look at how many pictures of friends and family are stored on your computer? What about all of your personal documents or music files?  Nowadays, when you buy a computer, you most likely will get a hard drive with about 250 gigabytes (GB) of space or more. That’s a lot of space compared to the 5 GB hard drives from 10 years ago!

Computers today are built to hold vast amounts of data, whether it's pictures from your vacations, videos or even schoolwork and/or study materials. However, the reality is that computers, like all other machines, are imperfect creations. The hard drive that is currently storing your precious memories, music and/or personal files is made up of moving parts, an aluminum platter, some pins and copper wiring.  Believe me, I’d be happy to never have to worry about my hard drive failing, but unfortunately, there is no guarantee of that.

The little-known fact to not losing all of your data is that it doesn’t cost a lot to backup it up, and there are multiple options as well. 

Backing up data to a CD, while effective, is not very efficient. CD’s are cheap but only hold 700 megabytes (MB) of data. It’s just simply not enough space if you are trying to backup pictures or music. If your computer doesn’t have a CD writer, you can always buy an external CD writer.

If you have a DVD writer on your computer, it’s a better option. A standard DVD can hold up to 4 GB of data (roughly 4096 MB), which is an improvement from CD’s, depending on how much data you need to back up.  However, if your computer is older and doesn’t have a DVD writer, you may have to look elsewhere. An external DVD writer is also an option. The external devices are almost always USB-compatible and should work with just about every computer.

Another option is the USB Flash Drive (Flash Drive). Flash Drives come in a variety of sizes and costs. They are very portable and handy and may well be the right option for backups. If you use a USB Flash Drive for backup purposes, don’t carry it with you. Once you backup your files, store the Flash Drive in a safe location. If you lose it, there goes your backup.

The best option, in my opinion, is the USB external hard drive. The external hard drive is simply plugged into an open USB port, much like the flash drive. They are plug-n-play devices, which means they don’t require any configuration. Just plug it in, and it is ready to go. The cost of an external hard drive varies depending on capacity. The smaller the hard drive, the cheaper it is in cost.

By backing up the data, you are guaranteeing that if you experience some sort of hardware issue, your data will be safe. A good rule of practice would be to create a backup every month. If that’s too much, then try every quarter. As long as you have some form of backup, you’ll be able to breathe a little easier if your computer goes down. Be smart and be safe.