Your home computer is often used to store the digital photographs of your family, many of which may not have been printed. It also houses your digital movie and music collection, which may represent a significant investment at today’s replacement costs. Memorable and irreplaceable email and messenger conversations, and other documents may also be included in the contents of your computer. For many families, these will be the only copies that they have of these files, meaning that if their computer were to fail suddenly, they could experience a great deal of loss without a backup.
You never know when your computer is going to fail. Even a brand-new computer may experience a fault that causes its failure, or even worse, may be subject to an external event. A thunderstorm or Hack, for instance, may be enough to fry your computer and cause the loss of everything on it. The only way to ensure that you don’t lose everything that is important on the computer is to make sure that you have copies of all your data backed up and stored elsewhere.
You may choose to manage your backups yourself, manually. But in choosing to do this you are taking on a major commitment. Your backups need to be completed on a regular basis, and frequently too, or else there is the risk that you will suffer a major computer failure in between backups. Anything that hasn’t been recently backed up will be lost, at potentially huge cost to yourself or your business, or at a personal loss to you or your family.
Not only is setting a suitable schedule and sticking to it a problem, deciding what to backup is also a problem. Copying your entire drive or folder is effective at catching all changes, but it is time-consuming and inefficient. More efficient and quicker is to only backup new or altered files, but in doing this manually, you risk missing one of the new or altered files. A far safer alternative to manually managing your computer backups is to invest in a software suite that will automatically manage your computer backups for you.
There are some commercial software packages that are available that will do this for you. The features will vary from one software package to another but may include such things as automatic backups any time that your backup drive is connected, or when you connect to your network so that your software can backup to another computer. Some may watch your computer for changes and make a backup of the altered file whenever it is noticed, making sure that there is never anything that isn’t backed up. Version control may also be offered.
Though some may only backup the files on your machine, others may backup or mirror the entire drive including the operating system. This makes for the easiest system restoration possible, as it is possible to simply recreate the entire software system if you were to get a virus or experience another failure on the computer. With the variety of packages available there is software to fit any budget.
Though there are a number of ways that you can manage your computer backups, the best way to handle them is automatically. This way they can never be forgotten, never be overlooked or in any way incompletely handled, and your system won’t constantly be slowed down by the always on the transfer of data. Instead, you will be given the peace of mind of knowing that you have the backups that you need, at the time that you might need them.
