What is the most important thing I can do to my computer?

Backup Your Files:

Why Should You Backup
Your Computer Files?

What Should You Backup?

Your computer is like your car, it needs constant maintenance to keep it in running order. A lot of people don’t realize this and they fail to do the minimum monthly maintenance. “What kind of maintenance needs to be done?” you might ask. Well, in this article I explain the first and most important maintenance process you need to perform. Backing up your files is important, first of all, because most mechanical things are known to break down at some point—and computers are no exception. A virus could invade your hard drive, the hard drive could break down for various reasons, or the Operating System could just go crazy and give you something like the “Blue Screen of Death”.

Where Should You Backup Your Files?

It is very important that you backup your files to a separate location from your main hard drive. If your main hard drive fails, you lose all your files plus your backup. The following are types of media that you can backup your files on:

Well, to answer this question we first need to discuss the different types of backups that can be done.

1.    Full Backup – A full backup is a backup of all files you select to be backed up.

2.    Incremental Backup – An incremental backup is backing up all files you select which have been created or changed since the last backup. It marks each file as having been backed up and the file will remain marked as such until the file is changed in some way.

3.    Differential Backup – A differential backup is backing up all files on your computer that have been created or changed since the last full backup. A simpler way to put it may be backing up all files that are new. If you did a backup every day then all the new or changed files would be backed up but the files that haven’t changed wouldn’t be touched. The computer also marks files in the same way they are marked during incremental backup.

 1.    External Hard Drive – An external hard drive is a hard drive that is usually enclosed in a plastic case and is very portable. It usually connects to your computer by a USB cable. This type of media is very high speed causing the backup to be completed in a very short period of time. There are two main styles of external hard drives available on the market today. The standard hard drive saves information on magnetic platters. The newer hard drives are solid-state hard drives or SSD’s. These have no moving parts and the information is saved on a computer chip much like the computer chip in a USB thumb drive (to be discussed later). Another benefit to using an external hard drive is the capacity. Most hard drives are rather large (anywhere from 100GB to 2TB), this helps to prevent running out of space used to save your files thus you can save more than one backup to the drive.

2.     CD-RW or DVD-RW - I say RW (rewritable) because you can rewrite the files many times. You would not want to backup to a CD or DVD that is not rewritable because once you put the files on the disc, that is it--once the files are changed the disc is nothing but a plastic coaster. CD-RW or DVD-RW discs are good for backup but are slow and don’t hold as much information as a hard drive. If you do backup to these discs, you will have to use more than one disc. Writing to a CD or DVD is a slow procedure but can be good for a secondary backup or used if you do not have an external hard drive.

3.      USB Thumb Drive (Flash) –Writing files to a thumb drive or other flash drive is very fast, but they are often limited as to how much information they will hold. Thumb drives are rarely sold larger than 32GB, so you would only want to use one if you have only a small amount of data to backup. Unless you plan to use several thumb drives, then it might make sense.

4.     Online Backup (The Cloud) – Backing up files to an internet server is the latest trend in computer backup. This is a very good way to backup your files. Some people worry about sending files to a server on the internet, thinking they are not secure. There is really no reason to worry about online backup. The companies that offer online backup go out of their way to make sure your files are secure and are available to you no matter where you are; if you have an internet connection, you have access to your files. The speed of the backup depends on the speed of your internet connection. Besttech Computing recommends Spideroak Online Backup.