Online Backup Guide

Once you have decided to backup your data regularly, you need to decide on an effective backup strategy. The strategy will be different for different kinds of people. However, the features of an effective strategy remain the same. What are these features?

• It allows you to restore any data you may need.
• It is easy to follow.
• It’s cost effective.

Let’s look at each one in detail:

Your backup strategy allows you to restore any data you may need: At the outset, you need to identify the importance of the data on your PC. For a person working out of his home, his computer data is invaluable and no part of the data must be lost. In this case, a daily backup is recommended. On the other hand, for someone who uses his computer mainly to play games and surf the net, a weekly or even a monthly backup of important files and configuration settings is enough. After all, even if he loses the high scores for the few days when backup was not taken, what will he lose? Some high scores, some browsing history. This will not seriously affect him.

Your backup strategy is easy to follow: Any backup strategy is meaningful only if the PC user is able to follow it continuously for a long period. Taking regular backup is easiest when it done in an automatic fashion. For example, if a person decides to take a backup every 7-10 days, chances are that he will forget when the last backup was taken. If the computer crashes in between, then there will be loss of data. The solution is to stick to a particular day of the week. For example, the data is backed up every Wednesday. In this case, possibility of forgetting to backup is minimized. (An even better idea would be to schedule weekly updates on the computer itself.)

Your backup strategy is cost effective: Currently, hard disks that are available in the market crash often and hence you have to backup data to safeguard against disk failure. However, the threat of data loss is ever present; even if your disk does not fail, you can inadvertently delete important files and settings. Hence you need a backup strategy that is cost effective. The different backup solutions are as follows:

• Copy data to an external hard disk. This is the cheapest way to backup.
• Write a CD-RW disk if you have a CD writer. This is also a cheap option; however, the capacity is limited to about 700 Mb per disk.
• Write a DVD-R Disk if you have a DVD-writer. This option is getting cheaper by the day.

Ultimately, every one needs to decide on their backup strategy. These guidelines will differ by the monetary and time value of the data stored. The backup strategy used for a office PC used for business purposes and a home PC used for playing games will be different. The important thing to remember is to consistently follow a backup schedule.