Monday, March 5, 2012

Practical Backup Solutions For Your Computer

By Dudley Haessig


Doing regular backups doesn't occur to many computer users until it's too late and their system has become corrupted or crashed. If you have ever lost any valuable data when you experienced a computer problem, you know how devastating it can be. There's no feeling that compares. If the files that you lost were important ones relating to your business, it can be tragic. In this article we'll be looking at some of your options when it comes to backup solutions.

Your first step is realizing that you have to find a backup solution that will store your information offsite. Unfortunately, although this is obvious to a lot of computer users, it's not something that a new computer user may have considered as necessary. You may think that you can simply copy your files to another spot on your computer. Well, that's just not sufficient. If your hard drive crashes, you'd lose them all, no matter how many copies you made. It doesn't matter if you are using a free or paid backup system, you have to keep where your files are stored in mind. Where do they store your files? Offsite? No one is immune to systems crashes, hacker attacks, and other unexpected problems, so it's essential that data be stored in at least two separate locations. One good online service that has free and paid services is called CrashPlan. Its most basic plan is the one that's free. It lets you do a daily backup either to an external device you have or to a computer other than the one the files are on. If you are more interested in unlimited online storage for your personal backups, you can check out CrashPlan+, one of their more advanced options. There are a couple of options beyond this as well, such as CrashPlan Pro, which is designed for small businesses. CrashPlan has options appropriate for almost anyone's backup situation and is user-friendly and affordable.

When thinking about backup solutions, don't feel that you have to choose only one option. In fact, for most people, it's generally best to use a combination of methods for different types of data.

All of your information that doesn't need high security can go into such free services as Dropbox or Google Docs, while any important information that needs more protection, can go into an external hard drive or a paid service. It is always possible to have something happen to the place you backup data, so it would be wise to have more than one backup solution for your important files. When backing up data, being as secure as possible, is always best.

With all of the various solutions for backing up your computer, you should find at least one to protect your important files. Never depend on one device or location to store anything important. When you start to look at all the places you can store files, you'll soon realize that it's not very difficult or expensive. If you want to feel safer about your information, all you need to do is get a method for backing up your computer.




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