Are You Backing Up Your Files?

Working with computers requires consistent back up. Many computer users don’t remember to back up their files and when their computer hard drive crashes they loose all their important data.
This can prove to be a very costly mistake. At the minimum we should aim to do a full system back up every month. Preferably however we should back up our computers files every day or every week at least. If you fail to back up your files, you can also loose photos and valuable personal effects.

Lets look at what can happen if we don’t do back ups. Say you are working on an important project and you spend days, weeks or even longer creating documents and other files. So one day you will be working on your computer, only to find that the whole system crashes. Without warning you’ll loose all your data. Work you have created that has taken you weeks, months or longer is gone. How would that make you feel?

So how can we back up our files? What possibilities exist to do this efficiently without loosing important data? The following are some suggestions on what is currently available in the marketplace:

• External hard drives up to 2 TB (Terra bytes=2,000GB)
• Zip drives (100-200MB)
• Compact Flash Card (128MB up to 2GB)
• MP3 Players
• iPod
• Re-writable disk

I guess this would have given you some options on what to use to back up your files. You might also realize by now on why it is important to back up your files on a consistent basis. If you fail to do this you will regret it. I can almost guarantee you this. Which option you choose will depend most likely on finances and the state of your computer. If you have an old computer then most likely you will only have floppies. That means that your best option would be zip drive back up.

But whatever your situation, I truly hope that you realize the importance of a system back up of your computer on a regular basis. Even if you have nothing of importance in your computer’s hard drive, you will most likely have family pictures or videos from past holidays you don’t want to loose. If you do you I truly hope that you have taken some prevention steps before.