Very often, when a person’s system crashes, there is a great amount of data loss as a result of having to format your hard drive and re-install Windows. Few people have the resources to “slave” the drive on another computer and extract their valuable information before redoing the system. Microsoft has done a wonderful job in designing operating systems, but therein lies the trap!
Posts Tagged ‘System Crashes’
Registry Fix Software
Sunday, June 28th, 2009Unless you’re a computer geek, you may not be able to easily associate computer issues with registry problems. It is usual and common to think that slow connection is due to internet issues and not with the registry of your computer. Most computer issues such as slow connectivity and system crashes can be rooted to a corrupt windows registry.
Why Should a Small Business Spend Time and Money on Data Backups?
Monday, June 8th, 2009Andrew Whitehead is a contributor at Free-backup.info — the home of the popular Amazon S3 based online backup solution — Back2zip. This article is also at http://free-backup.info/small-business-spend-time-money-data-backups.html
What is a Data Backup and Why is It Necessary?
Data backup is as important as the data you store on your system; if that holds valuable information critical to the daily operation of your business, then making a backup of it is also critical. Think about the customer information, supplier details, debtors & creditors, etc. stored on your hard drive, and then imagine that one morning you can no longer find them.
Backups are for your peace of mind, and to save you a lot of time and money if anything terminal happens to your data files. Your data is fundamental to the operation of your business, and should be valued as an important asset.
Any backup is basically copying your data files to disk or some other storage device, to provide a working copy of your data ready to be restored if the original copy is lost, damaged, or corrupted. This can can occur in a surprising number of ways – viruses, power failures, power spikes (these may not even be noticed! ), system crashes, external events such as flood, fire, theft, or vandalism , or even a simple user error.
A Sample Data Backup Procedure
How often you make a data backup depends on how frequently the data changes, the value you place on the information, its importance to your business, and the cost of replacing or recreating it. If you consider that your data file is too important to lose, or that it would be costly to replace, then you must backup regularly.
If you open and update your data files every day, you should set aside a labeled disk/tape for each day of the week and make a backup everday. The following week, when you next enter the backup file name, you will be prompted to overwrite or append the previous weeks file. If you overwrite, you will then be in a weekly cycle. If you are confident that you will always have space on the media, you can append and have a two weekly cycle.
If you feel your information doesn’t alter that frequently, you can backup once a week and rotate disks on that basis – Week 1, Week 2, Week 3, Week 4, back to Week 1 again.
The ultimate system is to keep buying new media, backing up daily and working on a very long (6 monthly or more) cycle. This is to ensure that there is always a clean backup if a fault goes unnoticed for any length of time, but it is really overkill for a small business.
Don’t Forget to Check That Your Data Backup Has Worked!
Don’t be misled into thinking that because you have run a backup that it has worked, there are numerous horror stories of PC users suddenly needing to restore and only then finding out that their backup procedure has been routinely failing. You should regularly test the backup media to confirm that the data has been successfully backing up.
Don’t put off learning how to recover files until disaster strikes. Practice to familiarize yourself with the process and make this a regular event, especially after any upgrades or changes.
Why Do I Need to Backup My Files?
Wednesday, May 27th, 2009Walter Stevens is a contributor at Free-backup.info — the home of the popular tool for online backup and recovery — Back2zip. This article can be found at http://free-backup.info/why-do-i-need-to-backup-my-files.html
What is Backup, Anyway?
Backup should be an essential part of your computing experience if you spend great amounts of time on your computer and/or use your computer for important personal or business dealings. There are too many stories of people who have lost all of their files due to system crashes or computer viruses to ignore. When you backup your files, you are storing your files separately from your computer.
In this way, if your computer crashes or is infected with a virus that results in a loss of files, you will still have access to your files on backup disks or whatever other backup program you choose to use, such as online backup. You can then restore your files to your computer proper from these backup sources.
Why Do I Need to Backup My Files?
Don’t fall into the old paradigm of “it will never happen to me.” While there is certainly a chance that you will never have a need for the backups you make of your files, if something does happen to your computer you will certainly be glad that you have them. And you do not have to backup your entire computer, although this is certainly something that many people do, but only the files that are of the most importance to you.
Some things are easily replaced, and there is no need to backup these sorts of things, but those irreplaceable documents or files that are yours and yours alone should be saved in a place where they cannot be damaged. That way, no matter what happens to your computer, you can have security in the fact that all of your files are available in backup.
So How do I Backup My Files?
There are many possible methods for backing up your files. Floppy diskettes are a very common way, although this is somewhat falling by the wayside as computers are using floppy drives less and less. It is not uncommon to not see a single computer with a floppy disk drive on display when you go to the computer store to buy a new computer. CD-Rs are an excellent method for backing up your files.
CD-Rs and CD-RWs allow hundreds of times more storage space than a floppy disk could ever hope to have, and with increasingly faster CD burners they are becoming faster and easier to use all the time. It is possible to save 800 MB of data onto a CD in only minutes, and for many people they can backup every file of import on their computer onto a single CD.
This is far easier than have stacks of floppy disks lying around your computer desk which you must dig through any time you are trying to find a particular file that you have saved in backup.
Online backup is another excellent method for the backing up of your files. This allows you to store your files online, where there are no need for disks or CDs, and you can simply download your files back onto your computer whenever you want.
Whatever method you choose, remember that backing up your files is very important, and make sure that you do so to protect against the worst.
