Backup Your PC Now

In two weeks, we’ve recovered data from five PCs. Most of them were home PCs that weren’t backed up. More than 20GB of photos, accounting files and documents would have been lost between the five of them.

And that’s why we’re pleading to you now: back your stuff up now.

If you don’t have a backup system in place, we have some tips on how to do it on the cheap. The first thing is to figure how much room you need and exactly where you data is. If you’re not sure, you may want to consider buying a good-sized external hard drive that will backup your entire system.

Mac users can use Time Machine for easy data retrieval (as long as you’ve got a newer OS and you’ve purchased a Time Capsule from Apple…or at least initialized an external hard drive). Windows offers many options for the average user, but the built-in backup utility is antiquated. Here are some quick and easy solutions.

Backup Everything
Buy a big USB hard-drive and use the software that it comes with backup everything you have. I just checked with Staples and found a large Maxtor for $120. Using the included software is fairly easy and most users would have plenty of room to spare. Pretty easy, but not cheap.

Backup Online
You pick what you want to backup and let the software handle the rest. This is a safe option since everything is encrypted as it is uploaded, but it’s pretty slow even with a great broadband connection. It may take days to upload your files and getting them all downloaded in case of a system failure will take a long time too (it’s normally quicker to download than upload). For home users, Carbonite and Mozy are our favorites. For business, we like MozyPro despite the higher cost per GB.

Other Options
DVDs and other options have significant drawbacks in capacity, but if you have a small number of critical documents and little in the way of multimedia files, you can use an external USB flash drive or CDs/DVDs to backup. The flash drive option is more simplistic and faster, but you’ll likely want at least a 16GB USB flash drive. On the flash drive side, Kingston has never let us down.