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Backing Up Your Digital Life

People are becoming more reliant on their computers and are storing more and more important files on them, so backing up is becoming more and more important. Loosing the files on your computer could mean loosing all your family photographs, your music (and maybe your movie) collection and all your documents and letters.

Here are some methods of making a back up of your files. They all have their individual advantages over one another - some are safer, some are expensive and some are fairly complicated - so it could mean that a mixture of 2 or 3 methods are best suited to your situation.

CDs & DVDs

If you only need to back up a small amount of data and you don't need to back those files up very often then a set of either CDs or DVDs could be the answer. Both blank CDs and DVDs have dramatically dropped in price of the years, so are very cheap to buy, they can also be stored relatively easily - I'd recommend a CD Wallet.

You'll probably have two types of file that needs to be backed up. First up are files that are used and updated regularly - such as a spreadsheet that keeps track of your accounts. Other types of file that you'll want to back up are files that aren't going to change, such as songs you've downloaded from itunes or photos you've taken with your digital camera.

Making a backup of the second kind of file on to CDs or DVDs is ideal. For example, after you've been on holiday and taken a set of photographs with your digital camera, burn that set of images to a disc so you've got all those photos on one CD as well as on your computer's hard drive. The same can apply to music you've brought and downloaded, at the end of each month just burn the mp3's to a data disc - so you'll have a disc for every month (or maybe 3 months) of downloads.

For files that you'll be updating, adding to and amending the best course of action would be to either keep versions of the file (i.e. speadsheet-feb2007 and speadsheet-april2007) and back up those files at the end of each month. Alternatively, you could rewriteable discs to continually save only the most recent version on your backup CD.

External Hard drives

This solution is possibly more suited to people with a large amount of information to back up more often. External hard drives come in a number of shapes and sizes, from tiny 4gb usb key drives to larger 320gb external powered hard drives which can be used to make a complete and regular duplicate or clone of your hard drive and therefore backing up everything.

Software can help you manage your backup to an external harddrive, programs will keep track of the data that is on both your computer and your back up hard drive and monitor what has changed and make sure there is a version on both the computer and the hard drive. Alternatively you could just make a complete duplicate of your computer on to your hard drive at the end of every month or week - what ever regular time period that suits the way you use the files on your computer.

Offsite Backups

This is one of the safest ways to backup your data, but also the most time consuming and depending on how much information you need to back up - it can also be the most expensive due to ongoing costs. One website that we would recommend is Mozy.com which gives you 2gb of storage for free which could be enough to store your most important files. If you want more space then there is an option to upgrade to unlimited amounts of space for US$4.99 a month. The website allows you to copy, via the internet, a selected set of files and folders from your computer, this initial backup can be very time consuming (2gb will take just over a day) but once complete the Mozy software will keep track of your selected files and folders and then only upload new files and versions of existing back up'd files.

Offsite back up is most safest form of backing up because you've then got a copy of your data away from your computer - if you house was burgled or there was a fire, your back ups could be stolen or damaged along with your computer - but with offsite backing up there is no chance of both main computer and offsite backup being compromised in one act.

What's the Best Solution

Everybody is in a different situation so this may not apply to you directly, but we would recommend the following stages.

1. A back up of everything you have (a duplicate or clone of your hard drive) on an external hard drive.
2. A CD back up of files that are irreplaceable, such as digital photographs.
3. An offsite back up of the most important files, such as work related documents, letters and accounts.

With this method you would have 2 or 3 copies of the majority of your files and in 2 different locations so if the worst did happen at least you would have the most important files available to retrieve.

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