You’ve spent several months researching the latest in technology and you buy a brand new top-of-the line laptop. You move over all of your important documents, family pictures, and videos. Everything is working great and you’re loving how fast the new computer is. One morning you start up your new computer and there’s a dreaded message that your hard drive is not installed and your computer doesn’t start.
This isn’t fiction – it actually happened recently to my cousin.
No problem you say, since you’ve got all your data backed up you can just get the computer fixed and put back all of your important files.
What’s that you say? You didn’t back it up? You’d better hope that whoever fixes the computer can retrieve all of your files!
Even though buying a new computer usually means that you’re getting something that is secure and reliable, there are no guarantees. The first thing to be done once the computer is up and running is to set up a backup routine. In future posts, we will discuss the process of deciding how to back up and getting it done.
One easy method for dealing with a failure with a new computer is to leave all of your files on your old computer for a period of time. In the case of my cousin, even though this happened 1 month after he started using his new computer, all of the files were still on his old one and were easily retrieved.
That’s great you say, but what about the important files like finances and other documents that change every day? For those types of files, all of these remained safe as all of them were located in a cloud based service, such as Dropbox. Getting your frequently updated files into a cloud based service is a good first step to protecting all of your files.