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Importance
Most people do not realize how important the data on their computer is to them
until it is too late. While there are many solutions to backing up,
most require some sort of maintenance.
The most likely pieces of your computer to break are those that have moving pieces:
fan, power supply, and hard drive. If anything except for your hard drive dies,
you can just replace the piece and the rest should be good. However, if your hard drive
is broken, it is much cheaper to restore from backup than it is to pay a few
grand to a data recovery services.
Strategies
I've found the most important part of your backup solution is organization of your information.
If you don't know where your files are, it's not very likely that you will be able to recover it effectively.
Also, there is no good reason to backup your entire hard drive, operating system and all,
unless you have the capability of recovering it properly. Your best bet is to keep everything
in one folder on your machine (for example, the My Documents is a good place), then
backup that folder periodically.
External Hard Drives
The simplest solution for backup requires no software at all. Simply purchase
an external hard drive, then periodically copy your vital information to it.
Keep in mind that anything you save on your external hard drive should also be
on your local hard drive to ensure that if the external dies, you don't lose anything.
Recordable Media
If you want to store multiple versions of your backups, and have less than 9GB of data to backup,
a recordable DVD-RW drive (or recordable CD-RW if less than 600MB of data) can work well.
This also doesn't require extra software, other than that which comes with the drive to allow
you to record a data DVD (or CD), but it does require that you know where your data is
that you need backed up.
Backup Software
It is a lot more efficient to use software specifically suited to the task
of backing up your computer. While there are a lot of software solutions
out there, there only a few I would recommend actually using.
However, even with the software you still need a place to back up to like
an external hard drive, recordable cd-rom or dvd-rom.
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Powerful backup solution which allows you to backup your entire system to
another drive of the same, or larger size.
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Solution that has been around for a long time and
specializes in effective backup with ease of use in mind.
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