Backup Strategy For Laptops
It does not matter if you travel with your laptop computer or notebook. A successful backup strategy entails having your files backed up in more than one spot. Usually you will need an external hard drive stored in your home, another portable external drive that goes with you on your travels, and additionally a back up to cloud storage. If you use all three backups, it won’t matter what happens your data will be safe.
External Hard Drive for Backup Strategy
An external hard drive is the first part of your backup strategy. Try to get one big enough to store your computer laptop’s entire hard drive. It is even preferable for it to be larger than your laptop hard drive. Then transfer everything from your laptop computer to the external drive on a regular basis. Many portable hard drives come with software to either remind you when you have changed your hard drive files or backup automatically at predetermined times. There is also software available to purchase that’ll regularly update your backup whenever you modify or create new files.
Keep your your external hard drive handy so that you remember to connect it to your laptop whenever you’re at home. If not, you might forget to back it up for a couple of weeks and risk losing data and that all-important document you’d been working on for months! You might want to consider purchasing a second hard drive just to be even more secure. You can rotate the two external hard drives and store one away. If you are travelling, do not store your external hard drive with your laptop. External hard drives will not be affected by x-rays in luggage or carry ons. You may even want to buy a second external hard drive and store it in a different location at home to be extra safe, particularly if you are travelling with one.
Backup Strategy – Backup Services
There are many online backup services on the market, with monthly charges starting from $10. Again, for even a more secure backup strategy you may even want to sign up to more than one service. All the services are not the same, however they include software for either a PC or Mac that checks for modified or news files. All services work differently, but most allow you to download a program to your PC or Mac that’ll automatically check for new or modified files within the folders you specify. These services are “set and forget” once they’re up and running.
In order to make sure that your backup strategy is working as planned, you should always test your backups. Test any online backup service regularly. Even if you have no need to yet, you need to make sure it’s easy to recover your files. This will check both the recovery process of the service you’re signed up to, as well as the fact that the backup has actually worked!
The biggest drawback to online backup services is that they use a whole lot of bandwidth to upload all your files, particularly during the initial backup..The initial backup can also take quite a few weeks to complete (depending on your hard drive size) and the software may use a significant amount of RAM while it completes. While your online backup is in process, make sure you have an alternative backup strategy in place, too.
Backup Strategy is All-important
It seems that everyone I know has either documents or pictures and videos stored on their computers. Printing hard copies or saving on floppy disks is time consuming and costly. It is just easier to store data on your computer for the time you do need to access it or print it out. It doesn’t matter whether you work online or store music and pictures for pleasure only. Your data is important to you, and if you have ever had a computer crash or had one stolen you know that having a backup strategy is crucial.