Data is very important therefore the backing up of it is crucial. backing up data protects against accidental loss of data, database corruption and hardware failures.
Your hard drive might crash. Thieves might steal your laptop at a café. You might realize on Friday that you desperately need the now-departed Wednesday version of an important document that you significantly altered on Thursday.
At times like these, having a secure, up-to-date backup of your hard drive can be a lifesaver. Here are seven practical strategies, including using USB storage, backing up via the Internet or through your local network, backing up Windows itself, and preserving huge media files like songs and videos and crucial documents on your computer–to protect yourself against catastrophic hard drive failure, your only real choice is to constantly back up everything important that you do. As with any other form of backup, it’s important to regularly check what you’ve been backing up to ensure that everything’s always where it should be. Good backup habits are a very important part of computer repair-and can leave you with some much-deserved peace of mind.
Options for backing up data at home:
- External hard drives: Typically backup software is used in conjunction with a separate hard drive that is not the same drive which holds your operating system. This can be an attached USB drive, Networked Attached Storage (NAS), or even a separate hard drive inside your computer. External hard drives are my choice for the most reliable, simplest, and most affordable method of backup for home users. They’re gradually increasing in size and reliability, and many now come with software that can be used to back up your data regularly and perfectly.
- Flash drives: If you don’t have a massive amount of data to back up, a portable flash drive is a great backup method. Flash media is extremely hard to break, very reliable, and modern thumb drives can hold upwards of three or four gigabytes of information. Plus, the portability means that you’re never without your crucial files.
- Remote data storage via the Internet: For example Cloud Solutions: Dropbox, Amazon s3 and mozy from EMC. Files are uploaded to a remote backup server either automatically as the files are changed or periodically based on a schedule. You transfer all of the files you want to back up to a cloud based service, then download the files as needed. The advantages to these services are pretty awesome; your data is encrypted, so it’s kept very safe. Since it’s not in your physical location, if there’s a natural disaster, your files are still fine; no matter what happens, you’re never more than a click away from your data.
- CD/DVD-ROMs
It may seem obvious, but these days, nearly every computer has a DVD-ROM drive that can write large amounts of information relatively quickly to either a DVD-R or CD-R disc. The discs themselves are relatively inexpensive, and they’re a great form of data backup, as long as they’re kept properly labeled and checked for consistency.
References:
http://voices.yahoo.com/top-five-data-backup-methods-home-computer-users-158815.html?cat=15
http://www.pcworld.com/article/170688/7_backup_strategies.html
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