Back up your data

There is never a bad time to back up your data except trying to after you’ve lost it all. Backing up your data is very important if the information that the hard drive contains in important. There’s nothing worse than getting a virus or your hard drive corrupting when you go to use it realising that there is little hope of retrieving your data. One of our members at Technology, Artificial Intelligence, Space & Science (TAISAS) lost his hard drive data when the computer refused to start up. Because of his intellect with computers he was able to retrieve some of the data on the corrupted drive. Just to make this post a little more useful this is what he did.
The computer would boot but then would crash when the OS (Windows XP) tried to start up. This was due to part of the hard drive being corrupted. To retrieve the data he inserted a “very bad” copy of Linux on a CD to boot from. From there he navigated to his saved files and copied them on to a thumb drive. Once complete, he reformatted the drive and reset the BIOS to start over. This took him a few weeks. Working on the computer, while doing other work and diagnosing other problems he encountered, saved him hundreds of dollars from hiring an actual computer technician who would have likely been able to recover nothing.

Now on to backing up your data, why do it? Not only will it save you time and money it will also enable recovery of accidentally deleted data and corrupted data. When making a back up you should back up all data that you have created. Generally you don’t need to make back up’s of programs but you can if that program is hard to find, very important or would cause you loads of trouble from the producer.
When you back up data it is important to back it up to a different location to where it is originally held. Backups that are done over the internet ensure that if something where to happen to the building in which the original data was held, like burning down the other data will be save. The problem with this is that sending data over the internet can be dangerous so encrypting the data while it is being sent and decrypting it once it arrives at its destination is the way to go.
There are two main backup methods you would use backing up all the data or just the data that has changed since last time. Backing up all the data could just be a waste of bandwidth for many so most choose to back up the data that has changed. One other thing to consider is how often you should make a backup. Once a week, daily, every time it changes? Really it is up to you and it depends on how much data can you afford to lose. If you can’t afford to lose any you should back up your data every time it changes. The type of drive you should back up to is also important but where not going to get into that. If you need the latest and fastest drive it’s quite simple to do a little research as it goes along way and it can save you a bunch.