Monday, October 28, 2013

Providing back up data/files on your computer system

Providing back up data regularly helps protect it from being erased if something happens to your computer. Timely and regular back up makes your work safe and accessible whenever your system crashes. You can access a data backup from another computer if your original computer’s hard drive can’t be read, thereby saving you the time of reconstructing your important files or data. A data backup can also be used to transfer important files from one computer to another when working with several computers or to archive previous versions of a particular file.
Computer Backup
It is a good idea to back up data in several different ways, so that you have an extra backup in case your primary backup medium fails. You may also want to dedicate backup media to certain files such as a flash drive just for your current writing projects or an external hard drive just for your photographs or music files.

There are so many storage media to which you can back up data. The one you choose depends on the amount and nature of the data you intend to provide a back up for.

Flash drives: you can get a flash drive from any seller or at any super market. Plug into your computer’s USB port, then go to my computer inside your system to format it before using it. Flash drives are useful for storing your most important files in the system and making it available for use when the system has crashed or to transfer files between computers.

Recordable CD-ROM and DVD-ROM discs can be read from your computer’s CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive. They must be formatted, or “burned,” using a drive capable of writing on them; most recent computers have drives that can write both on CD-ROM and DVD-ROM discs. Recordable CD-ROM discs come in 650-megabyte and 800-megabyte versions, while recordable DVD-ROM discs can hold up to 4.71 gigabytes. Recordable discs come with two designations: “-R” for discs that can be written to only once and “-RW” for discs that can be written to and read from multiple times. They are best suited for back up data for future or later purposes. If your laptop doesn’t have a Disk drive then you could use a USB Flash drive and simply drag and drop your files onto that.

Portable external hard drives: They come with a USB cable to plug into your computer’s USB port, but have the storage capacity of a computer’s internal hard drive. They are convenient for backing up large amounts of data on a regular basis; many come pre-installed with data backup software.
Online backup systems: Where data is backed up onto a remote server. Online backup is offered by companies that specialize in the service or by Internet service providers as part of their service package. The amount of backup capacity available depends on the provider and how much server space you can afford to buy.

Your computer data can be backed up using one of several methods, below that are easy to do:
Copying and pasting the data: This is the simplest way and can be used when storing in either a flash drive or an external hard drive. This can be achieved by right-clicking your data and click on copy, then click paste inside the backup devices you intend to use.

Use your computer’s backup utility programme: Most computer operating systems come with a backup utility programme that supports storage media above for the backup of your files. Meanwhile, you can plan the backup schedule in your system. To be effective, data backups must be performed regularly. You can back up data manually or set up an automatic backup schedule with a backup utility programme to back up data for you on a daily or weekly basis. It is very important that you back up at least once a month.

Software backup utility programme: You can purchase backup utility software from other companies, which is designed to work with any of the backup media listed above. Some freeware and shareware backup utility programmes are available as well.

Source: Business Eye

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