Today, we use our computers more then ever. We store everything on them from pictures to important documents. Your data is like gold so you have to treat it that way. If your computer looses all its data and you have no back up, your system becomes an expensive paperweight. We see so many times when a customer will call us with a bad virus infection or a computer that will not boot and they are begging us to save their pictures. The first thing wee ask is “do you have a backup?” Nine out of ten times the answer will be no. With all the online services that are out there today, there is no excuse for not having your data backed up. The new Microsoft One Drive (formally Sky Drive) is a free back up that can get you up to 10 gigs for free. They give you bonus gigs for signing up friends and backing up your phone pictures. In addition if you use Bing as your search engine, Bing gives you points for using the service and if you accumulate 100 points, you can get 100 gigs of space for a whole year. This is a great deal and the service works really well. In addition to back up options that are online, you can also buy USB sticks or external hard drives. What I personally like to do is to image my drive. When you image a drive, you actually save every bit of information that is on the drive and it is bootable. If you image your entire “C” drive to an external hard drive, you can actually swap the media in the event of a failure and boot your computer with it. There are a number of programs you can use but our personal favorite is Casper. This program has never failed me yet. Whenever I made a backup with this program I never had an issue getting it to boot into Windows. In short, be sure you have a backup of your data. Do not rely on chance because it is not a matter of if you will have to format your computer but rather a question of when. Posted by,...
Read MoreI can still remember the very first computer I bought when Windows 95 was the big craze. Technology was extremely crude compared to today’s standards but having a Windows machine was an exciting experience back in the day. I can still remember the first time I got connected to the Internet and the exciting rush that I felt that night. It was amazing how much information was already out there to grasp. With all the hype and excitement back then most of us never thought about what would happen if the hard drive went south or we needed to reformat the machine. Backing up was not on the minds of most of us in the early days of computing. You have to remember that back in the Windows 95 days, USB was a new technology and did not work more often then it did. In addition, cloud computing or backups were not even thought of yet. Most of our back ups were either on Floppy disks or Zip Drives. Back in the day that was all you needed because the files were so small. It was not until Windows 98 was introduced that USB connections actually started to work. Even then, you had to be sure to have the right drivers for the device you were using. External hard drives were starting to make their way into the computing world. In addition, the Zip Drive was made more robust with higher capacity disks and faster read speeds. When Windows XP was introduced, a whole new world was opened up. To this day, it is one of the best operating systems that Microsoft has ever developed. Driver technology was completely changed when Microsoft pre installed drivers for many common operating devices. The age of Plug And Play is born. Now, all you have to do is plug your external hard drive into the USB port and it is automatically recognized and installed. Backing up became much easier and less of a chore. Since then, hundreds of back up programs has been introduced into the marketplace and the sheer number can make choosing one a complicated task. Today, backing up has evolved into a complete necessity rather then...
Read MoreHi everybody. I am always preaching to our customers about how important it is to back up your files and pictures. Backing up should be part of your regular maintenance. There are many ways to do this but if you do not use a method you are comfortable with, you will probably not perform the backups as often as you should. I generally recommend backing up weekly or more often if you add a lot of pictures or music. I will describe some of the best ways to achieve this in this column. One of the easiest ways to do a basic backup is by using a simple flash drive. These simple devices plug into your USB port on your computer. The drive will then show up as a removable drive in you’re my Computer folder. You can then simply drag and drop or copy and paste your photos and documents from your main drive C to your new removable drive you just installed. Once you have backed up the files you want to save, you can remove the flash drive from the computer and put it in safe location. If you do not like the idea of using a piece of hardware to store your files, there are online options as well. If you want to do a full backup of every file on your computer, Carbonite is probably a good bet. The program is installed on your computer and once you create an account, you can go through the options and choose what folders you want to back up. This process can take a very long time to complete. It is not uncommon for the program to run days at a time to get all your information in the “cloud”. One drawback of this program is that it will slow down your system. This is especially true if the backup is running while you are trying to work. We have seen some older or slower computers really bogged down while running Carbonite. Bear this in mind when making your back up decision. I would like to introduce you to one more backup solution. It is called Sky Drive. One of things I like best about this product...
Read More
Recent Comments