Backing up your digital files: Part 1

OK you have heard it a million times and you are sick of it...well get ready to hear it one more time. There is nothing and I repeat nothing that we can stress more then for you to be making reliable backups of your content. We have amassed large collections of music, photos and movies over the years and we would hate to see that all disappear with one hard drive failure. We can't tell you how much data we have lost over the years do to computer parts failing. Computer parts fail, it is a fact of life. The computer you are reading this post on will fail at some point. If your home machine happens to meet this fate, there is a good chance it will take all of your precious media with it.

There are many, many, many different strategies to backing up your data and in part 1 on this topic we want to cover the most basic of all backup means.
Go down to your local electronic store or better yet, over to Amazon.com and buy yourself a nice big external USB hard drive. Once you plug this into your computer your OS will need to format it so it can write data to it. We'll leave you to take care of that. All we are trying to say is with a small investment you can protect your digital media for a long time. What would be ideal in this situation is once you have copied all the data you want to back up to your nice new external drive, shut it down and put it away. Take it out once a week or once a month, whatever you are comfortable with and add your new files to it.

This will greatly reduce the wear and tear on the drive and increase its longevity.
While we know this isn't the best method to backup your data, we feel this is a great starting point and if we can just help one person save their files.....then our job would have been worth it :)
Enjoy your digital media and be happy in knowing that it is safe and sound on your new backup drive.

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Posted by David Ficocello at March 6, 2007 8:53 PM