What’s worse then that feeling as your car door shuts and you realize your keys are locked inside? When you forget about those cookies you put in the oven until you smell them burning? When you realize you are thirty minutes late for a job interview?
It’s when your computer crashes, it won’t start up, and there is nothing you can do to get back your precious data – pictures, documents, emails. Of course if you have backed up all your data, and can easily restore it then this is more of an inconvenience then a disaster. That’s what this article is about – how to backup and restore your computer data.
In my opinion the best way to back up your computer is to have it continuously and automatically backed up in “the cloud” – i.e. an external site on the internet. There are many services to do this but I pay to use Carbonite.com – $59 US per year – and have nothing but good things to say. Some other popular backup services are Dropbox.com and Backblaze.com.
With Carbonite you just sign-up, decide what folders you want backed up, and then Carbonite does the rest – using your internet connection to copy your data to their secure servers. It even keeps up to twelve versions of each file. The best part is that the data is easy to restore when needed so if you need to go back to an earlier version of a file – say your resume – then it is only a few clicks away. Carbonite has saved my bacon several times.
The most important thing is that you back up your computer. It is not a matter if your computer will die – just when.
To ensure your email is always backed up – and accessible to you from anywhere – use Gmail or another cloud-based service. I like Gmail because of its features and the 7 gigabytes of free space.
Believe it or not March 31st is World Backup Day – see http://www.worldbackupday.com/ for more info and tips.
