Backing up… but not in reverse.

Do you backup? Should you? Backing up ensures that your information is not affected should anything happen to your computer’s hard drive. It can be as simple as copying your files to an external hard drive once a month, or you could use an online backup service that automatically backs up changed and new files every night. Let’s put it this way: If something were to happen to your computer and you lost everything on it, what files would you absolutely have to have? Professional data recovery services usually start around $1,200 and increase exponentially based on the size of your hard drive. What information on your computer would you be willing to pay that much to get back? If the answer includes music, videos, and photos, then the simplest backup solution is an external hard drive. If your answer is Word and Excel documents, email, and financial files like QuickBooks or Quicken, then you could benefit from an online backup solution. For an external hard drive backup, Western Digital and Seagate offer good solutions with the My Book and Free Agent line of hard drives, respectively. There are many online backup solutions. Two that I would recommend are Mozy Online (though I have seen some machines slow to a crawl when using the always on backup, meaning it will constantly backup throughout the day when it senses a change); and Dr. Backup. Mozy gives you 2GB of storage free, or charges a monthly fee for unlimited storage. Dr. Backup charges a monthly fee for storage depending on how much you need, and has excellent customer support available by phone, email, and instant message. A good rule of thumb for online backup is that if you have more than 20 gigabytes of data, you’re either backing up unessential files or you need to switch to an external hard drive method. This is especially true if your Internet connection is DSL, because it could take several days to back up several gigabytes of data. If you would like to discuss a backup solution, or have questions about any information here, feel free to contact us.