Do you perform a hard drive back up every day, once a month or never? Don't fall into the trap of never backing up your hard drive; if your computer suffers a fatal error and you lose all your data, you'll wish you'd had a backup plan in place. When should you back up, and how?
Back Up Based on Your Computer Use
Are you a casual computer user, or do you use your computer daily for important work? Your computer usage habits dictate how frequently you should back up your hard drive. If you don't do a lot with your computer besides browse the Web, send e-mails and store photos and other files, you can probably get by with a weekly backup.
If you use your computer for work and manipulate important files every day, you should set up a daily backup. Time Machine for the Mac even works on an hourly backup schedule, to ensure your important files are always available should you have a massive hard drive failure. Keep in mind that backups take up space, so the more often you back up, the sooner you'll run out of space and have to start deleting old backups.
Data Space Required
When you're thinking about how to back up, the first thing you need to consider is where you'll back up your hard drive. If you have a CD or DVD burner, you can burn backup discs with your data. The downside to this is that you'll wind up with a stack of discs if you're backing up your entire drive. Backing up important data only can cut down on your disc needs.
The availability and relatively low cost of external hard drives makes them an ideal choice for performing backups. You can erase old data and keep only current backups, and you don't have to worry about sorting through endless discs to find the backup data you want. If you can afford it, external hard drives are the preferred backup option. This is also the best choice if you want to back up everything on your hard drive, including software and system settings. By creating a complete archive, you'll be able to transfer everything to a new PC quickly if your hard drive fails.
Software Makes it Easy
Backup software isn't a must-have, but it certainly makes the backup process easier. This software goes through your computer, finds files that aren't backed up and saves them. It also prompts you to perform a backup on your scheduled timeframe, so you don't have to worry about forgetting to back up and then finding yourself in trouble if you have a computer issue. If you want to copy your entire hard drive, software is a must to ensure that preferences and system files get moved along with obvious things like program files and data.
If you don't have backup software, you can still perform manual backups on your computer. Simply select the files you want to save, such as picture files, movie files or important documents, and copy them to disc or to your external hard drive. The problem with performing backups manually is that you must keep track of which files you've already backed up, or back them all up every time, which takes up a lot more space than you would use with backup software.
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