Windows Data Backup Help
- May 6th, 2010
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Approved by:
Gary Mix, a network specialist and Wedding Photographer in Gainesville Florida
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Sadly, one of the most important functions of computing that is unnoted is data backups. Probably the most valuable asset we have is our data, and countless users only realise this when it goes missing and they can’t restore it. Backing up is easy to do and very cheap too.
So why do so many users fail to make any type of backups at all?
Well, because when things are working fine, users think there is no problem. But your computer can crash anytime and when it does, you can have some serious problems. How much valuable data is on your hard drive? Do you store family pictures, home movies, financial data? What would happen if you lost all of that data right now? Take a minute to think about this, because if your hard drive crashes, you could lose priceless data. You may be able to use data recovery software to fix this, but that is definitely not a 100% guarantee.
Some quick and easy backup methods are listed below:
External Hard Drives
External hard drives/USB drives are becoming very cheap. This is making it more competitive with magnetic tape as a bulk storage medium. The major advantages of hard disk storage are low access times, availability, capacity and ease of use. These type of drives are very easy to connect and you can store them remotely. This is the easiest way to get started with backups and is highly recommended. Just copy across all of your vital data on a regular basis.
Optical Storage
CDs or DVDs can be used to store and backup your data. One advantage here is that CDs and DVDs can be restored on any machine with a CD-ROM/DVD drive. In addition, these media are low cost. HD-DVDs and BluRay Disks dramatically increase the amount of data possible on a single optical storage disk but are not as cost effective. Optical storage is good for small amounts of data, but with data requirements becoming larger and larger, it is not the most efficient method.
USB Drives
These are also known as USB drives, flash drives, thumb drives, CompactFlash, SmartMedia, Memory Stick, etc. These devices are extremely portable and easy to use. They don’t offer huge capacity, but they are useful for backing up only the important data that you require. For full system backups, most would not use this type of storage.
Magnetic Tape
Backing up to magnetic tape has long been the most commonly used medium for large data storage, backup, archiving, and interchange. Tape has typically had an order of magnitude better capacity/price ratio when compared to hard disk, but recently the ratios for tape and hard disk have become a lot closer. Tape is a sequential access medium, so even though access times may be poor, the rate of continuously writing or reading data can be quick. Backing up to tape can be more costly and has greater overheads than many other techniques and is recommended for business and commercial use.
Hosted Backup Services
With net connections getting much faster, the use of remote backup services are flourishing. These services are cheap and very easy to use and they offer great advantages of having your data fully backed up in a totally different physical location. Initially backing up all of the data can take a long time, but future backups are much faster as you only need to backup files that have been edited. Remote backup services are great for both home and business users. The only real drawbacks are speed issues and placing data on a remote server that could be compromised. So always select a trustworthy service.
Whichever technique implement, just make sure you backup your data somewhere! You can learn more about backups at Windows Data Recovery.