SI Money Savers

The following is a guest post by my husband:

When is the last time you made a backup of the important data on your computer? If you never have, you’re not alone, but you might feel like it in the event of a computer crash.

I cannot stress enough the importance of backing up your important documents, photos, music, etc on your computer.  You can save yourself a lot of money and hassle by taking a simple precaution now.

As a technology consultant, I get customers who are frantic because they do not have a back up copy of the photos that are on their now virus ridden computer. Or a customers will come to me because their computer has crashed and their entire music collection is in the balance.

Please, don’t let this happen to you.

Many times, I can retrieve the data, but sometimes it requires an expert with a “clean room” to retrieve your data. And if that sounds expensive to you, it’s because it is.

Easiest way back up your data

One of the easiest ways to back up your valuable data today is by purchasing an external usb hard drive. An external usb hard drive is basically just a hard drive that lives on the OUTSIDE of your computer, and plugs into your computer via a usb cable. You can copy your data over to that hard drive as a backup, unplug it, and now you have 2 copies of your important data. A great article on the ins and outs of external hard drive back up can be found at one of my favorite sites “HowStuffWorks.com”.

Other ways to back up your data

There are of course numerous other ways to back up your data such as:

• burning a CD or DVD of your data (if it’s not too large, otherwise you will need a lot of CD’s/DVD’s)
• “backup data online free” with services such as g.ho.st
• “turn your old hard drive into an external hard drive”-if you have an older computer around that you no longer use, if the hard drive is still good, you can convert it over to become an external hard drive for about $15!
• back up data to a usb flash drive, a.k.a. “thumb drive”, a.k.a. “memory stick”

If you don’t feel like you’re “techie” enough to do something like this, or you just want to make sure “it gets done right”, ask a tech friend to help.