Now I usually don’t make posts like this, but after having several friends get burned by not backing up the data on their computer, I figured it might make a good post.
Now, you may think that you don’t need to backup you photos, music collection, documents, etc….but ask yourself this question: “If I woke up tomorrow and everything on my computer was gone, how bad would that be?”. If that wouldn’t be a big deal for you, then I would say that you don’t need to backup anything. But if the thought of losing all of your photos, school work, important documents, home videos, or anything else scares the hell out of you…you need to back up.
Now you might also think that you are safe and that your hard drive will never crash. Well, you are dead wrong there. Hard drives are one of the few parts in your computer that still contain moving parts, and moving parts eventually wear out. In my experience hard drives are usually the first thing to fail in a computer. I’ve had 2 fail myself, and know countless others who have had their HDs die on them.
So here is my one suggestion: If you have anything on your computer that you would be heartbroken to lose, you need to start backing up immediately. As a photographer, I back up nearly every image I ever take to multiple locations. I have three hard drives dedicated to backup mounted under my desk and also backup all my images online (in the case that a fire destroys my computer and backup drives).
So what can you do to start backing up now?
- Buy and external hard drive and copy all your important data to it. Make sure to update what’s on this drive regularly or use a program to automate it.
- Backup your most important stuff online (for free!). Dropbox provides 2GB of online storage for free and it integrates seamlessly with your computer. Sign up using this link and get a bit of extra space.
- Backup all kinds of stuff online for a small monthly fee. I use CrashPlan for my online backup and backup EVERYTHING on my computer and archive drives.
So there you have it, chances are if you read this far, you need to start backing up today. And if you already back stuff up regularly, cheers for being awesome!