Chandlers Ford Computer Care

Why it is important to back up your data

You should have backup copies of all your data for a number of reasons - a file can be accidentally (or maliciously) erased, hard drives and other hardware can fail, your PC or server could be stolen, and, in extreme cases, disasters such as fire or flood can occur. This could mean losing all your data and information.
What to use

There are several methods you can use to back up your data. These include:
CD/DVD-Recordable
External hard drives
Online backup services

CD/DVD-Recordable

Whilst in the recent past, floppy disks and other removable media such as zip drives were adequate to back up, they have little capacity and are generally outmoded. CDs have a capacity of 700Mb and DVDs 4.7 Gb (about six CDs worth) so unless you only have a very small amount of data to back up DVD should be used. DVDs are universally available and relatively cheap. DVD-RW discs will allow rewriting but given the cost difference, they aren’t recommended. DVDs can be damaged though which could be disastrous when trying to restore lost data – we’d recommend that an external hard drive is now a better option given the low prices.

External hard drive

These devices have become more popular as prices have fallen, and for good reason - they are mobile, fast, have large capacities, are portable and compact - all these things make them good candidates for backing up. Units are available which are tailor-made for backing up with capacities of up to 1Tb (1000 GB) + and include basic backup software.
Another option is to use a NAS (Network Attached Storage) device as a primary backup device. Whilst they are bulky and would not then be removable they do have the advantage of being quick and in some cases come with multiple discs if one disc fails, the other will take over with no loss of data.

Online backup services

These take advantage of the popularity and availability of broadband connections to upload files to a web server. Various companies offer this service.
Your broadband supplier may have a favoured solution. These services use incremental backups so that only the first backup would be of all the user files in the shared directories - after that it would only backup those files which were new or had been changed. Software is provided allowing you to schedule backups.

This type of system, although it has obvious hassle free advantages, is currently quite expensive unless you have relatively small amounts of data to backup.