How long have you own your computer?1 month?1 year or many years? Regardless how long you own your computer, it is extremely important to have a very good backup system. I'm sure all of us got many collections of files and folders stored in the computer's hard drive. Some of us may have thousands of songs and movies (illegally not to mention but who doesn't :p) downloaded from numerous sources on the net and full archive of photos from 5 to 15 years ago. Have you ever imagined if someday your hard drive crashed or fried by overheating or stolen (happened to a famous movie director)? What will you do? You might try to recover your drive but the success is not guaranteed though (if you got 50% recovery you're lucky enough). But what if you're out of luck? You gonna lose all of your data! All of your collection of files will be gone. Whatever you have on your hard drive I'm sure you can't afford to lose them. That’s why everyone must have a good backup system.
How are backups being done?
Backup is simply means having the extra copy of files stored inside the computer's hard drive elsewhere. There are few ways of how backup can be done. The simplest way of doin backup is having an external hard drive when you can store all of your data in it. You can also upload them to online file hosting services or having your multiple drives at RAID 1 configuration (may require advance knowledge on computing so it won't be discussed here).
1) Online file hosting.
Online file hosting means hosting or keeping files online. Keeping files on the net doesn’t necessarily mean it is freely available for every internet user. You can save your files privately or share them with anyone who has the access to the internet. There are tons of online file hosting services freely available to use. I'm sure you've heard about RapidShahre, SaveFile or BoxNet. These are a few example of site that offers free online file hosting while at the same time also offering file sharing. I've personally use some but Orbitfiles is the only one I'm sticking with until now. It offers 6 Gigabytes of storage for free. Orbitfiles users can also share or even sell them (assuming you have full rights on ‘em)! To host your files online, you will need to upload them to the server. Most of the services use internet interface to upload file like you do when uploading photos and videos to Blogger or Wordpress. Some of them also provide free application software for easy uploading process. Orbitfiles users can download free software called Hercules uploader which is very handy to upload your files to the server. You can schedule the uploading process to be at 3:00 am every morning or 2:00 pm every Monday. It is free and easy to use. I use online file hosting only for important and small files. Small files are much faster to upload than larger files. If you need security for your files, you can password protect your files using Winrar. A simple .zip or .rar file with a strong encryption (password) is almost impossible to be opened without the correct password. Even with a good computer, you'll need years to break the code using bruteforce attack. You can click the link below to visit Orbitfiles website.
2) External Drives
The easiest way to do backup is by having an external hard drive. External hard drives have become the most popular option for either extra storage space or backup purposes. Year by year the price of hard drive dropped quite rapidly. External hard drives come with a wide range of capacity from old 8 Gigabytes to 2 Terabytes (1 Terabytes = 1000 Gigabytes). 2TB had drives are still expensive at the moment. An external with descent capacity (160GB - 500GB) is just nice for backup purposes. They are not that expensive as 2TB. Once you have one, you can start backing up your files. However to do it in regular basis is quite boring and after some times you won't care about you backup anymore. Some external hard drives come with its own backup software which is doing the boring part for you. I have one Seagate hard drive that comes with a program call drive manager where you can set the files or folders to be backed up automatically at any specified time. If the program detects any change of files in your selected folder, it will update your backup folder on external hard drive on the next scheduled time. You can also disable auto backup if you prefer that way. Remember this, computers and hardware can be insured, but the only insurance for data is backup!
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7019644.stm
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