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Backing Up Is The Name Of The Computer Game

Let’s begin by reminding ourselves of this one basic truth about computers – all computers fail.

It always comes as a shock and it always seems to send users into a panic when the hard drive goes out or the computer screen stays dark. But it’s bound to happen and, in fact, must happen to every computer sometime in their relatively short life.

This is why it is so very vital for everyone to backup the data on their computers and keep that data in a safe place. But unfortunately, while every computer user recognizes that need – the need to backup their important data – the fact is that not many users follow that advice. The reason for this is because backing up data requires us to actually do something and, although we can find hours to waste in front of a computer screen, we never seem to find the time to devote to backing up that data.

Software developers recognize the failings in human behavior pretty well and have tried to make backing up data as easy as possible for users. Both Windows and Macintosh software set up disk space on computers to store data and provide a measure of safety.

Unfortunately, for the most part, these apps merely give a false sense of security to users. When a hard drive does fail, it fails completely and denies the user access to all the data on the disk, including the data stored in the recovery partition of the disk. The only sure way to safeguard the data from the hard drive on your computer is to store that data somewhere else than on the computer. You have to have an external hard drive or you have to lease server space from a remote data storage provider.

But still, setting up a computer to download data to an offsite provider or to an external hard drive takes time and effort that few users seemed willing to expend. Fortunately for us all however, it appears that this will no longer be an issue because new external hard drives have come onto the market that provide the safety needed without any effort on the part of the user.

I’m not going to discuss offsite storage solutions through the Internet even though some companies have developed software that makes these backups effortless. The reason is because backing anything up through the Internet requires a high-speed connection as well as plenty of bandwidth. Many computer users deal with Fair Use Doctrines that limit the amount of data that can be downloaded from the Internet. This doesn’t necessarily affect upload amount but after all, what you are uploading is what you anticipate having to download later on. Also, more than a few users out there have ISP service that provides them with fast downloads but really slow uploads, which could require initial upload time of two or more hours following setup.

This is why for the normal user that is storing non-critical data off their computer, I recommend the use of external hard drives for back up protection. If a fire breaks out in your home and takes your computer, obviously there’s a good chance it will take your external drive as well, so critical data storage requires some form of off-site protection for data storage and backup.

But assuming the only thing you’re really interested in protecting is your home data, photographs and that precious copy of Bejeweled, then the external hard drive should be more than enough protection so long as you set it up and use it.

Modern external hard drives don’t even require a power source. You just plug the hard drive into a local USB port on your computer and immediately the software goes to work backing up everything on your computer hard drive into the external hard disk. You can go on working with your computer while the back up process proceeds in the background. And with disk capacities now measured in the Terabytes, you won’t have to worry about not having enough disk space for storage.

So if you happen to be one of the computer procrastinators who have put off backing up the data on your computer, look into a new external hard drive and rest a little easier about all the important and valuable data resting on your home computer.

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