Stop here.

If you’re looking to lose your business documents or your baby pictures, stop reading here. Same goes for those of you that have huge music collections. Creative type? If you have spent countless hours writing, designing ads, architecting, editing pictures or video, or doing any sort of development and don’t mind losing it; there is no need to read any further. Let it all go.

Still with me? Awesome. Here’s how you can safeguard that data in the event of a hard drive failure. What’s a hard drive? It’s that thing in your computer where all of your documents are stored. They are actually pretty reliable, but sooner or later, many of them fail. Even if they don’t fail, problems with your operating system (Windows or Mac) can make the data inaccessible to the average user.  In either instance, not having a good backup system means you now have two problems instead of one.  Let’s try to avoid that.

The first thing that most users need to do is figure out what it is that they need to back up. That sounds pretty simple, right?  95% of it usually is, but it’s not unusual for people to forget about an address book or tax files or something else not readily thought of. Make a list and keep it handy. Part of your backup routine should be to examine this list once in a while and make adjustments accordingly.

The second step is making sure that where possible, these important documents are stored in central areas of the hard drive. Common folders named “Documents” or “My Documents”, “Desktop”, “My Pictures” or “Pictures”  and so on, are the best places to store documents as these areas are self explanatory and central to the user experience. The old maxim Keep It Simple Stupid comes to mind. Many if not most programs use these folders by default. Some don’t. It’s important to figure this out and note anything exceptional on your list.

At this point, you are actually way ahead of most computer users. The next step is to choose two methods to back up with. Why two? If for no other reason, because these methods are far from foolproof. Reluctant users, shoddy planning, buggy software, crashed hardware, and bad luck all contribute to backup failure here and there.
As for which two, the best choices for most users are external hard drives and online backup. The takeaway here is that of these two backup systems, one is local and one is remote. The latter option provides us with an offsite solution in the event of a real catastrophe. We’ll be breaking down the details of each and implementing all of these plans in the next two articles in this series.

Part II

Part III