My favorite analogy regarding backups has to do with burglar alarms. The very first thing people do after everything near and dear to them is stolen from their home is to install a burglar alarm. Seems logical to me that the alarm should be installed first.
Same goes with backups. We store very valuable things on our computers; pictures, documents, spreadsheets, homework, work work, Favorites from your browser (most people forget these altogether), etc. The hard drive on which those things are stored is a mechanical device that has the potential to fail at any time.
I recall a cover on PC Magazine in 1990 that had a 3600RPM hard drive in flames. The caption read something like, Not If, But When. Meaning that the drives were mechanical and would fail eventually. 3600RPM was the fastest speed hard drives were spinning at at that time. Today’s drives are running at 5400, 7200, 10,000 and 15,000 RPMs, with the majority of home systems running at either 5400 or 7200 RPMs.
Today’s PC architecture is designed so that Universal Serial Bus (USB) devices can be easily attached and configured generally with minimal user intervention and computer experience. Most USB hard drives on the market are two to three times the capacity of existing hard drives in use in most notebooks, netbooks and desktop systems making an add on USB drive overly sufficient to do the backup chores needed. In fact a 1TB (terabyte) drive can usually be used to completely backup two or three computers.
Once you buy the USB drive and follow the installation instructions. You’ll need to identify the information that needs to be backed up.
Most people think that all of the information on the drive needs to be backed up. That’s not necessary these days.
Most manufacturers today ship personal computers with a special partition on the hard drive that allows for easy restoration to the factory load (the same as the day you opened the computer for the first time). Each manufacturer has a different method for restoring (check your documentation or the manufacturer’s Website for specifics). Once your system’s hard drive is restored to the factory load, the backed up data on the USB drive can easily be copied back to the newly restored hard drive in your system. NOTE: NEVER do the restoration to the factory load unless you ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO. All information on the original hard drive will be wiped out prior to the drive being restored to the factory load. Restoring to the factory load is a good way to eliminate viruses, Trojans, worms, etc., when your virus protection program cannot eliminate the malicious software.
Next blog: Virus protection, Do I really need it?
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