Making Regular Backups

Most of you will have hundreds, if not thousands of photos stored on your hard drive which you have saved over the years, or documents from your home business that are crucial. Regardless of what it is, you should make regular backups.

We’ve had a large surge of computers booked in to our workshop that have had hard drives that have completely failed, and despite our best efforts, sometimes we cannot retrieve your precious data and unfortunately, if we can’t fix it the only people who can charge a lot more and have far more advanced ways of retrieving your data.

The best way to make a backup is to save copies to a USB memory sticks or an external hard drive. We wouldn’t recommend copying them to CDs or DVDs as they can easily become scratched, and these days only have a shelf life of about 5-10 years depending on where you’re storing them.

An external hard drive is by far the easiest way to store a lot of data as they can range from 500GB to 2TB capacities. The only downside to backing up to an External Hard Drive is that you will need to make sure they’re stored safely. Hard drives don’t take kindly to knocks, shakes, and drops, so a cheap external hard drive will do the job of storing your data, but it may be a little less protected to shock damage. So, if you’re going to purchase an external hard drive, make sure to spend wisely or risk losing your data.

USB sticks are by far the safest option for backing up your data. We recommend, if you’re backing up your data to USB sticks, to store them in a labelled box that you can store in a drawer or cupboard. That way you will never lose them. You can also continue to add more memory sticks as you accumulate more data allowing for.

If your storing data such as Sage backups or something similar, we would recommend using both memory sticks and external hard drives to store your backups. We cannot stress how important it is that you make backups of important data to an external hard drive. There have been many cases where customers have simply stored years’ worth of Sage backups to their documents folder on their main hard drives, and when they’ve failed they’ve unfortunately not saved them to any other external source, costing them a lot of time, money, and trouble.

Always make regular backups. If you’re unsure on how to do backups, then give us a call or drop your computer off with us for a full backup service. Our backup service starts from £10 and increases depending on the amount of data you have and the time it takes to transfer. We also offer external memory cards and hard drives ranging from around £12 and increasing as the capacity increases, and the technology it uses.