Backing up your data

I am often called upon to try to salvage user data, like Word Documents, Excel Spreadsheets, photos, music files, and so on. Of all of these items, photos must be the most valuable. This is a plea to all PC users to commit to making a backup plan that works for you. First of all make an effort to learn how Windows XP or Vista stores your data. What folders are your files kept in? Once you know exactly where your data is, backing it up is easy. You don't need any special software. A click and drag of a folder from one device to another is something simple enough that all users should be able to master the process.

What sort of devices can be used for backup? The most common and popular these days are flash drives, aka thumb drives or jump drives. I recently bought a 4 GB thumb drive at Costco for $28! That is an amazing buy, and even as I write this I know that prices are coming down every week, and someone somewhere is selling that same capacity thumb drive for less. Rule of thumb (pun intended) is to buy the thumb drive with the largest affordable capacity you can find. Your big box stores have specials on these every week. I am not sure how large these will become, but I see 8 GB flash drives advertised online. That is a lot of data!

The second most popular way to backup data is by using an external hard drive. These are sold by nearly every big box store and usually attach as a USB device. They are a hard drive in a case with a USB cable. Plug it in and it will be recognized immediately by your system as just another hard drive. These come in much larger sizes. I am waiting for the 1 TB (terabyte) model to become affordable. In the meantime, I use a 250 GB external drive. In my case, I separately purchased a hard drive and an enclosure (a simple aluminum case which holds the hard drive). This was less expensive. My 250 GB external drive is large enough to carry multiple copies of all of My Documents, so I back up My Documents every quarter and keep 3 backups. The beauty of the external drive is you can simply unplug it from one PC and plug it into another, so if you have multiple PCs in your house, this is a simple way to backup the user data of all of your computers.

Bottom line, have a plan please! I hate to have to tell a customer that their precious photographs or expensive music files are irretrievable.