Shelbyville Times-Gazette: Blog: How To Backup Your Data

How To Backup Your Data

Posted Saturday, May 30, 2009, at 3:58 PM
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If you are like most people, you probably have lots of digital pictures, financial data, or other important data files that you really would prefer to not lose when your hard drive crashes. A good backup routine is one that you should never have to think about. Today I would like to share with you a simple backup solution that will not cost you a lot of money and you will never have to think about once it is properly configured.

Step One: Buy an external hard drive. These devices are small, cheap, and available at Wal-Mart, your local office supply store, or your favorite online computer parts store. Price: around $100.

Step Two: Download SyncBack Free. This program is very easy to configure (three easy steps). Simply tell it what directories to backup, where to backup the files (your new external hard drive), and what type of backup you want. SyncBack offers many backup options and it uses plain, easy to understand terms. SyncBack is free to use for personal and commercial applications.

Step Three: Set a schedule. SyncBack provides a button that you allows to configure when you want the backup to run automatically. I recommend setting it to run automatically when your computer is idle.

That's it! To test your backup routine, create a new file in the directory you have set to backup and see if that file makes it to the backup destination. If you need more help read the help file located on the help menu in SyncBack, call a computer repair professional to set it up for you, or feel free to post your questions here and myself or one of the other tech savvy blog readers will be glad to help.

Comments
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Very good advice. I have worked on so many computers that people have had crash, trying to retreive data once it has crashed is not easy and it is very expensive.

-- Posted by 4fabfelines on Sat, May 30, 2009, at 5:30 PM

Nathan,

GREAT advice and advice I wish I had a couple of months ago.

I do have a question and I hope that you can help.

I have a couple of laptop hard drives that I was using as backup for music files, photos and such. Two of these have stopped working. There was no warning at all when they stopped. No strange noises or any of the "early warning signs" that I have read in my research in trying to rescue the drives myself.

The drives simply quit turning and in my opinion do not attempt to when connected to my pc via USB. Is there any way, other than the terribly EXPENSIVE data recovery companies that I can retrieve files from these drives?

One in particular is quite important to me. It has TONS of digital photos on it that I am unable to recover otherwise, but on my limited budget I am unable to afford the hundreds of dollars it would cost for the data recovery gurus to do it.

-- Posted by ghostrider on Sat, May 30, 2009, at 8:54 PM

Hello ghostrider. Have you tried connecting the drives directly to your computer's IDE or SATA interface? Just last week I had a drive inside a USB enclosure fail with read errors. When I removed the drive from the enclosure it worked perfectly. I put a different drive in the enclosure and confirmed that that enclosure was indeed broken.

-- Posted by nathan.evans on Sat, May 30, 2009, at 10:31 PM

I will try it.

THANKS!!!

Got my fingers crossed!

-- Posted by ghostrider on Sun, May 31, 2009, at 1:19 AM

If I understand correctly, you are connecting them through a USB cable? If both stopped working at the same time, could it be your cable, or if you use the same power cord?

I have a young kitten in the house and she has already 'modified' my mouse cable and it is now on life support.

-- Posted by stevemills on Sun, May 31, 2009, at 9:22 AM

Also another program I am fond of is call Cobian Backup 9.

Sounds similar to SyncBack. You can set it's schedule to copy to your extra drive and it has a bunch of cool optiona features such as encyption and compression.

-- Posted by benjithegreat98 on Sun, May 31, 2009, at 1:51 PM

I, too, learned the "hard way" on getting the blue screen and "hard drive not found" error! And I did have a portable hard drive, but had not backed up in 4 months! D'OH! I could have cared less that I lost 4 months of pictures and music, but I lost 4 months of accounting! Lesson learned! I signed up for Carbonite, which backs up online automatically and still backup once a week to the portable hard drive. My computer (laptop) is giving me fits again (and blue screens when I hibernate) and I'm backing up and trying to talk myself into just doing a complete reinstall and starting over. Sometimes I just hate technology!

-- Posted by neighborhood mom on Sun, May 31, 2009, at 6:05 PM

Great post, Nathan! I'm going to include a link to it in my column this week.

-- Posted by Jicarney on Mon, Jun 1, 2009, at 9:03 AM

Wow, thanks John!

-- Posted by nathan.evans on Mon, Jun 1, 2009, at 2:21 PM

Nathan Evans

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