How to Save Your Data, Time and Money
If you've ever lost a document, spreadsheet, email or any other type of file you'll know how incredibly annoying that can be.
There are two easy ways to protect your valuable files, save and backup.
Save
Most people forget to save their work as they create it, leading to so much lost time and money. When it comes to computers remembering to save regularly is one of the most important things you can learn.
Save as often as possible, whenever you pause, about once every minute. Once you get into the habit it just becomes second nature and you'll do it automatically. The easiest way to save is CTRL S on your keyboard, just hold down the CTRL key and tap the S key. It's the most important shortcut you will use and you can do it very quickly with your left hand, thumb on the CTRL key.
Backup
Once you've got into the habit of saving your files you need to get into the habit of backing them up regularly as well.
Always consider the worst case scenario and work backwards from there. The absolute worse thing that can happen is losing all your data completely with no chance of recovery. Then you can decide how much of that data is actually important enough to backup; could be all of it or just a few essential files. This helps you to choose a suitable backup solution with enough storage capacity.
The easiest way to backup is to save your files onto a portable storage device like an external hard drive or USB flash drive. Most portable hard drives will come with backup software and a simple one touch backup button.
You could use a USB flash drive to backup critical files that you use every day and a portable hard drive to do a full backup once a week.
Deals Direct have a good range of portable storage and backup devices to choose from and you'll get a great deal too because they're all discounted below RRP.
There is actually something else can do to stop data loss, buy a UPS (uninterruptible power supply or battery backup). Read our post about Continuous Power.
1 Comments
Yeap, I had a major computer melt down today, the anguish about the whole event was knowing that I had not backed up the program settings on the operating system drive. If you know how to do it, remove all the default program settings (like bookmarks, email caches, cookies e.t.c) to another separate drive so when the system does fail, you just have to re-point the program settings to the backup.