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I’m going to talk about your data for a while. It’s probably the most important thing you have on your PC, but do you do anything to make sure it’s safe?

I get quite anal about backups, it’s been part of my role across many jobs over the years, and I have also been a victim of data loss through a PC dying in a rather spectacular way, but the more I speak to people, the more it becomes apparent to me, that I am in the minority.

So, what does it take to back things up? What is the difference between disaster recovery, and just backing things up?

You’ll be pleased to know that it’s all relatively simple, and quite cheap to do, but can also get rather complex, and expensive if you want it to be, so it’s something that anyone of any technical ability should be able to get to grips with, and make a start on quickly.

First things first, the simple backup.

This is the easiest thing to do, and the two main options open to you, are backing up your files to an external drive (whether it be a USB hard drive, or a shared network drive), or backing up online.

I do both, but that doesn’t mean you have to. An external drive is relatively cheap (around £50 for 500gb), and online backup services start from about £4 per month for unlimited backup space.

The pros and cons? Well, if you backup everything to an external drive at home for instance, and your PC and backup drive get damaged in a home incident of some sort, then you have still lost everything. This isn’t an issue if everything has been backed up online, however these backups take a very long time to get everything initially backed up, and you need a relatively good internet connection to make it worthwhile.

I would say the online backup option is by far the easiest for the price, you simply setup an account on the provider’s website, install a little client application on your PC, and that’s it done. Within a few days (or weeks if you have a lot of data) everything will be backed up, and any new files will be backed up automatically.

If you have an external drive, you can use Windows Backup if you’re a Microsoft fan, or Time Machine if you use Apple systems. Or you can simply select the files you wish to backup, and manually drag them over to your backup drive if you find this easier.

I use an external 500gb LaCie hard drive, and also BackBlaze for my online backups (it costs just under £4 per month depending on the exchange rate)

Disaster Recovery

This relies on having your data backed up, but also takes into account where these backups reside, and something called ‘imaging’.

Imaging means you take a ’snapshot’ of your PC’s hard drive. This doesn’t just backup your data, but also copies all of your operating system, setting, and basically everything on your computer.

Why go this far?

Well, the easy answer is, because it’s easier. While it may not sound it, once you learn how to do it, backing up absolutely everything is easier than manually selecting things to backup, and also means that if your PC’s hard drive fails, or your laptop gets stolen, you can recover absolutely everything in one fell swoop and be up and running on a brand new system within an hour or two.

On my Mac I use a piece of software called Carbon Copy Cloner (which is free for my needs, although ad supported) and this copies my whole hard drive to my external drive. I can also boot from this if I really wanted to on any other Mac, so I had my own software, settings, and data available.

On Windows there’s a similar package called Acronis, this isn’t free, but it is quite cheap.

The important thing about disaster recovery is that you should make sure your image is stored ‘off-site’. Perhaps you could update the image once a week, and leave the hard drive in a locked drawer at work, or at a friend’s house, or even a fire safe at a secure facility if you are really paranoid about your data (I’m not quite that bad).

So what’s your excuse?

For the sake of a £50 hard drive, or roughly £50 per year, why don’t you back your stuff up?

Are your photos, music, videos, personal documents which you have written all without value to you?

I have had a digital camera since the day my daughter was born. Every important moment in her life (and therefore mine to a certain extent) exists in digital form on my PC. As well as a lot of music I have purchased online which I need to keep safe, and the time and effort involved in ripping CDs and DVDs again if I had to.

Several people I know post most of their pictures on Facebook, but they only store them in a very low resolution. Not the quality you would need if you wanted to print them for a photo album in the future. Some people store them on Flickr, this is better, but I don’t post personal pictures there, I don’t think most people do. Many people have started moving all of their documents to Google Docs, but what happens if your account is compromised and those files are deleted?

Cloud computing is great, and helps with working online, sharing docs, and collaborating, but I simply can’t rely on it as the sole source of my data.

£50 doesn’t sound so expensive now does it?