You're Backing Up Your Data the Wrong Way [Backup]

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You're Backing Up Your Data the Wrong Way [Backup]

Time and time again, people tell me that they've bought an external hard drive to back up their pictures, music, and documents. Great, right? Sadly, that's not always the case.

There's one simple rule about backups that everybody needs to fully understand: Your files should exist in at least Two places, or it's no longer a backup—and your data is at risk. Too often people delete the files from their primary PC, assuming they are backed up.

It's time to educate people on proper backup strategy, so we'll run through your options and talk about the pros and cons. These days, you've got plenty of choices on the Windows side of things, Mac users have Time Machine, and there's online backup for anybody.

Backing Up to a Local Source

When it comes to local backup applications, it's really a matter of preference, since most of them do the job adequately without a lot of fuss. The Backup and Restore application built into Windows 7 or Vista is a perfectly acceptable choice, and will handle most backups with ease. My personal choice is a paid version of SyncBack SE, but there's plenty of other choices for Windows, and all of them do the job.

The most important thing to remember when backing up your data is that you can't delete it from your main system once it's been backed up to an external drive. By doing that, you've left yourself with only a single copy of your important files, on an external drive that has just as much chance of dying as your internal PC hard drive. Think it can't happen to you? One of my external drives died last week.

Backing Up to an Online Source

There's quite a few online backup services to choose from, and while the great thing about online backup is that you don't have to deal with external drives, you're leaving your data in somebody else's hands, and restoring all of your files can take an extremely long time, since yo...

~david

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