We’ve all been there, sat staring at the computer with our hands behind our heads in dismay as our hard drive fails and all those brilliant holiday snaps are lost and gone forever. You know that no amount of turning it off and on again will help recover them, but you do it anyway.
It is then that you realize that you have all your passwords saved in one vital document on your desktop and that all-important presentation you have to do tomorrow morning at work has disappeared into the world of unrecoverable data.
This avoidable catastrophe always involves a lot of swearing involved, a lot of turning the computer off at the mains and giving it a good crack to give it some encouragement to whirr back to life. Yeah, it’s happened to the best of us, and we’ve all learnt from our mistakes and invested in some form of backup from Western Digital or an online cloud drive. Next time you will too, right?
We thought as much, so here’s our simple guide of four easy options to backup and save yourself the stress and even money of trying to recover lost files.
CD/DVD
Copying important files onto CDs and DVDs is a simple, if almost prehistoric, way of lowering the risk of losing everything. However, if you backup as often as you should, you’ll end up with piles and piles of old CDs with old files all over your office or spare bedroom. From bookcases, to shelves, to drawers and floors covered from top to bottom in dust-gathering discs, you’ll be surrounded by a sea of data that will take hours to filter through to find what you need.
USB sticks
Uploading your files to a small flash drive is much simpler than creating and sorting through multiple discs. However, with small amounts of memory you’ll have to use several to backup everything you need to. If you choose to use mini flash drives to store all of your photos, music and work files, keep them in a safe place as they are easily lost under car seats, in handbags and in the pub.
External hard drive
Attach a Western Digital external hard drive to your computer to backup your files with simplicity and ease. Just keep the hard drive hooked up to your PC or Mac and let the hardware do the hard work. External hard drives can continuously update and backup everything, so you’ll never need to worry if you forget to drag something across.
Online backup
If you don’t want to backup your backup, go for an online service which will come hand-in-hand with yearly fees in return for peace of mind. This is the easy solution for anyone who constantly forgets to keep their documents safe. There are some free options available online, but they often don’t give you the luxury of a full computer backup.
