I have found with experience that many people do not realise how dangerous it is to store all their important documents and files in one place, and by this I mean on a single hard drive.
The hard drive is were all your computers files are stored, these are things like Windows itself, your music, photographs and any other important files and documents you may have stored there. Just like any component in your computer the hard drive could fail at any time and if this happens any files stored on there could easily be lost forever. There are however a few simple steps you can take to protect yourself against this possibility.
First if your recovery software is stored on the hard drive make a set of recovery discs using your computers recovery manager. This is usually found by clicking the start button in the bottom left corner and looking under all programs. You will usually need two or three DVD’s for this.
Second is to back up any important files you have stored on your hard drive. Just how far you go with this depends on what you have stored on your computer. If you just have a few photographs or music files then a pen drive or flash drive will be more than adequate for this task. If you have a large number files or maybe run a business I would advise you use an external USB hard drive. These drives are available with various capacities and some can hold up to 1 or 2 Tb of data, and are used in exactly the same way as any other hard drive.
How often you back up your files depends on own circumstances. If you are a home user once you have completed an initial backup you only need to perform additional backups when you add or modify your files.
If you run a business or your computer holds large amounts important data you may need to perform backups at regular intervals, the frequency of which will again depend on your circumstances, maybe weekly or even daily. You may also wish to consider setting up a scheduled task to automatically back up your system at regular intervals.
One last way to protect your data is to backup your entire system using the Windows backup and restore option. This allows to back up the contents of your entire hard drive or drives to an external device such as a hard drive. Once completed in the event of a catastrophic failure of your hard drive your entire system can be restored from your backup.
If you follow these simple steps you will never have to worry about loosing any of those precious family photographs, your music collection, or those important business documents.
