How To Back Up Your Hardrive

Chris gives us the best tips he's got when it comes down to backing up your information.

How to Back Up Your Hardware Top five back up tips. Number one, the only back up important data that is important to note. You may think he has a back up of everything and then in some cases you might want to. But does not really make sense to back up programs if they can be reinstalled or programs that come with the operating system. Not so much because they can always be restored either by re-downloading or re-installing. You are just wasting space on the back up drive. So, you really only want to back up the things that are most important to you and my suggestion and recommendation for everybody along this lines, I keep everyone of my personal files, business files, files that I have edited or created there in my documents folder everything is in there. Including some files that I have downloaded from the internet and I want to re-install that I may forget at some point but now I know where they are at. They are all in there too. And the reason why I keep it in one folder is because hey I know which one I got a back up. Everything else, there is some data sitting throughout the rest of the drive that I may want to copy too and that is not as easy to track unfortunately because programs handle things differently like for instance my instant messenger keeps everything inside a data folder in the user’s directory or hierarchy inside the Windows. So, I always have to remember to copy that out when I back things up. But, you know just get your routine and stick with your routine but try to keep it all into one area and do your best to organize it. How do you organize it? Just do it the way you do it and then stick with that plan. Number two, do not back up to only one specific drive. Many people often back up their information to one specific drive and think they are safe. Chances are they drive it back up to you or fail at some point. And, the best way to back up your information is back up to multiple drives. But not just the multiple I had never back up to a hard drive in the same system, never ever. If anything I back up to an external hard drive move it away from the system or back up to another computer on the network, that way it is in the different room or I also back up to a drive and then take it over to well to a relative’s house he has got over there. We have also got a couple safety deposit boxes so I have got redundancy for my personal data. From my web data and this is kind of—it is interesting, now I have got back up of course for a web server but I upload a lot of my photos like social services like Flicker. So all my photos are there and you know they may go down there, I do not know if Yahoo is going to disappear anytime soon. And, the most videos that I do if not all of them are on YouTube. Quality is not amazing but you know we are typically recording from this live video feed and I would say that the live video feed is pretty good quality since we are doing this video live. So, YouTube is backing up my videos, Flicker is backing up my photos, I keep all my documents you know in as many safe places as I possibly can. It is just something to think about, starting to store your this kind of information on the internet, you got to be careful when you trust brands even like YouTube or Yahoo. I trust them but you know gosh I hope they are around a hell a lot longer than I am. Number three, protect your back up drives, sometimes your hard drives will fail and you will loose your data. There are some ways you can avoid this from happening to you. To prevent a hard drive form failure make sure it is in healthy condition. Defragging a drive or sometimes tell you if there is something wrong, getting some kind of a smart disk utility will allow you to see how well or how healthy that drive is doing. It is very important to watch the health of your hard drive, if you start to hear that it do wacky things and you will hear it to. There are different things that can happen to our hard drive, you will hear it fail in different ways. Sometimes it is worst, sometimes it is worsens clicks, sometimes it – well it does not exactly sound like that but you get the idea. If something sounds weird inside the computer it might be your hard drive and in which case back up quickly or just slap yourself from not having back up earlier. Number four, back up as many times as you can and that is important too. How frequently do you need to back up? Some back ups I do once a year, and those are the once that I take offsite. Because I do not really do a lot of new things on my computer, most my emails are stored on the server so I am not worried about that. A lot of documents that I need have already been backed up else where. You know my media is now published to the web so for me, backing up all site only needs to happen once a year. Backing up locally it is a little more frequent. Because if I know of I need to roll back to something I can go back to it. Which is kind of the genius of Apple’s time machine, yes fine I am an Apple fan boy but as far as time machine is concerned, amazing. Click ones, it is set and forget. It automatically backs up makes revisions of files that you can go back to genius idea from Apple, some people would argue, I think that they are incorrect in arguing this but they said that Windows has volumes shadow copy which they say is exactly like time machine but as snake eyes has left in our chat room just said it sucks, it is horrible. Most people do not even know whether is there and that only furthers my point it is pretty bad. You cannot even find it or you did not know there was the that at the team is worst than itself. Anyway, moving along number five, know which drives to use. Drives such as flash drives are a great way to back up small things such as documents or even programs just depending on the slot signs or the flash drive. They can range from 16 megabytes all the way up to 32 gigs. If you are thinking about backing up things such as movie files or music you know bigger files then well he recommends going to using an external hard drive.