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As the hurricane season in the Atlantic brews, it is a good time to check your stash of batteries, non-perishable food, and medications. Also decide how you are going to keep safe your personal digital photos, music, and scanned family heirlooms such as children’s pre-school art or letters from your grandfather to your grandmother during WWI. These are the kinds of items that in a natural disaster, fire, flood, or a hard drive crash–the most common issue to occur on your computer–seem to be the most cherished of things lost.
If you were to lose all documents on your computer, a data recovery service could cost anywhere from $500 upwards of $2500 to recover your files–if it is even possible to recover the data. To figure out which data backup solution is best for you, first take an inventory of what files on your computer you would want or need to access if your computer crashed or was destroyed. Keep in mind that there are many services that you already use online or “in the cloud” (on the company’s server) that keep your account information and documents such as online banking websites, email such as Gmail or photo services such as Shutterfly. You may not need to “backup” (or make a copy) of these files. The number one request for recovering files on home computers is usually photos, then music and finally documents. But inventory all files that are important to you.
There are several ways you can backup your digital files. While you may think that the easiest would be to copy files to CD or DVDs, this can become tedious, costly, and time consuming as your collection grows. If you have many photos that can be considered “large” (over 2 MB each), many music files, or are consistently adding to your collections, you may want to consider storage options that give you a bit more space, flexibility and allow you to set an automatic backup schedule.
Knowing that you will have your digital files available for you after a disaster or a hard drive crash is a great feeling. Regardless of which backup solution you choose, setting up your system now and not waiting for a catastrophic event to occur is crucial.