You Must Back Up Your Data!

You are dwelling in the world of microchips; living most of your lives thru computers nowadays.

You work, shop, and play using computers that have virtually become your business workplaces, audio/video systems, photo albums, journals, books, personal notebooks, etc. They are your dear data storage devices, which have become widely popular among your governments, police agencies, companies, businesses, organisations, etc.

However, computers are not 100 % foolproof; files might become corrupt, motherboards might start malfunctioning, CPUs might crash resulting in complete loss of data and files. Thus, your data files in your computer systems are not always completely safe. Yet, data backup is the best defense against all such computer glitches. Backing up your data is very important, as data loss can cause major crisis or worse. It may lead to your business failure; you may lose your business or a lot, or you may go through severe headaches of data recovery, which may end up with nothing.

Sometimes, your data loss may not cause you financial ruins, yet it’s always frustrating, isn’t it? So, why don’t you back up your data, when you can ward off most of your headaches and frustration by just doing that? Therefore, back up your data before you lose any of your crucial documents, favorite digital music collections, irreplaceable photos or videos, etc. You can save a lot by just creating the backups or backup files of your data. Backups refer to the copies of data that you can use after any of data loss events.

You can use backups primarily for two purposes –
(1) to restore a computer to an operational state following a disaster (called disaster recovery), and
(2) to restore small numbers of files after they have been accidentally deleted or corrupted.

Your backup types may include full backup, differential backup, incremental backup, mirror backup, daily back up, and copy backup. However, the most important question is “What to back up?”
You should back up your data, such as your personal files like letters, projects, sent e-mail messages, your e-mail address books, and any other information that is essential.

Next, important thing is how to back up your data? You can simply do that getting copies of your data off your hard drive. However, you need to have complete data storage computer support. You don’t require any special software or skills, if you are creating backup in Windows XP. You can copy your files or folders, just right-clicking on them and selecting Copy from the pop-up menu that appears.

Choose the disk or drive where you want to store the duplicate copy, right-click again and then select Paste from the pop-up menu. You can also copy files in other (95, 98, ME, NT, 2000, 2003) Windows operating systems using a drag-and-drop method - hold down the right mouse button while dragging a file or folder, then select Copy Here from the pop-up menu that appears.

Your e-mail messages and address book lists can also be shifted and then backed up along with other personal data. However, the process varies depending on which e-mail software is used on your computer.

You can create onsite backup or offsite back up. Besides, you can protect your data by using a technology called RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) that can be configured to make copies of all files to a second hard drive as they are created. If the first hard drive ever fails, the second drive contains an up-to-the-minute "mirrored" copy of all your data.

Walter