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, Ross Deprey