How to properly backup your PC? A guide to procedures, software, hardware and online

The computer has become today a precious object, not its commercial value, but for the amount of data that are stored in it.

Those who work with the computer always needs that it is fully functional and that there is no risk of losing the documents, but also those who use computers for entertainment only holds valuable information in memory, and I think especially to photos, as well as personal documents.

For these reasons, when a machine breaks down, can be a disaster if there is first prepared.

The hardest part is definitely not a piece to replace or reinstall Windows, but the recovery of data in it.

The important thing to prepare, therefore, is a backup copy of the data, ie a backup.

So many people, consider backing up a job as boring as challenging, because the data to be saved could be hundreds of gigabytes.

We must therefore prepare for today, without delay, in an intelligent way, taking advantage of every opportunity to back up, especially free, offered by the market.

There are many methods to make a backup of your data and you need to find those best and most practical, ignoring the expensive solutions.

The selection criteria take into account four main factors: Price, Capacity, Speed, Safety.

 

The main ways to create a backup for any emergency are:

1) Use an external hard drive

The undisputed champion of backup is the external hard drive even if today you can not really say which is the best.

The price of external hard drives, though it remains high, it is the best combination of capacity because it is the price you can buy a 1 TB disk to 100-150 Euro.

And if you have a new PC with USB 3.0 port, transfers from external disk to the internal disk also become extremely fast.

In security, however, this solution has its Achilles' heel because an external hard drive can be stolen or it may break.

Advantages: Portable, simple and affordable.

Disadvantages: can break easily, Space limited, vulnerable to theft or physical destruction.

 

2) Network Attached Storage or NAS

The NAS is a professional solution that has a higher cost though not excessive.

The NAS is an external hard drive which, however, has wifi network connection.

Their ability exceeds that of a normal external hard drive and can be up to 16 TB or more.

The speed of data transfer is limited by the network that should be of type 802.11n for good performance.

A network with weak wifi card of a different type, it can transfer data at a speed of one gigabyte per minute.

In terms of safety, above procedure is repeated for the external hard drive.

Advantages: The backup is automatic, fast and everything on the net, with proper configuration you can also access the NAS via the Internet from anywhere.

Disadvantages: The price may be high, you need a cool and safe place to keep the houses with the discs inside.

 

3) Cloud Storage

Save the data to an online space, on the internet, would be a great innovative solution if he had not yet certain limits rather serious.

Taking into consideration always the same 4 parameters we see that the capacity / price is very high, often with monthly subscriptions and limited space.

The speed, as it is based on the Internet (other than a wifi network connection inside), it will never be high enough.

Internet access is a bottleneck in Italy makes this solution almost impassable.

Even with regard to safety there are many weak points to the dangers of hackers and data theft.

Theft and physical destruction, even if possible, it is extremely unlikely, although you need to rely on a service reputation and proven honesty and professionalism to avoid the risk that it will be closed and makes it impossible to recover the data.

Advantages: different options available, access your files from anywhere with an Internet connection, Auto-Sync, free for small amounts of memory.

Disadvantages: need an internet connection fast and stable, the prices are very high compared with other solutions, vulnerable to hacking.

 

4) Physical Media CD, DVD or Blu-Ray

This solution seems archaic today, but it can still be taken into consideration.

The price is low and the capacity can theoretically have no bounds, since you can also use dozens of discs.

The speed of the copy of the data is quite high depending on the burner you use.

For safety there are weaknesses regarding the physical support, easy to damaged, scratched or lost.

The discs, however, are small enough to be stored safely, maybe even in a safe.

The discs are also shock resistant and invulnerabilo water and power surges.

Advantages: Disks are cheap, storage is expandable by buying more disks, not sure if the disks are stored properly.

Disadvantages: A disc can be written once, does not allow for incremental beckup, do not allow you to change your copy of changed files

 

5) USB sticks or flash drives as memory cards are a mix between the solution of the external hard drives 1 and 4 the solution of physical media.

Advantages: very portable, tangible and simple.

Disadvantages: price per gigabyte generally higher than a hard disk, vulnerable to theft or physical destruction, a small amount of space.

 

Luckily, you can use several ways to keep backup copies of data simultaneously.

It can then create an optimal backup strategy is the following:

If you do not want to pay for a professional services online backup, it is important to know that almost all can be used for limited amounts of data.

Names such as Dropbox, Google Drive and Microsoft Skydrive which ensure security, speed and availability 24 hours a day.

By subscribing to these services, and installing the client on your computer you can keep documents in sync on one and the photos on another.

You can also backup the backup or copy these data in triple or quadruple copy.

For sensitive data, you can instead use cloud tools encrypted.

The music you can put it all online, up to 10,000 songs for free, on Google Play Music.

The videos can be loaded instead of a private channel of Youtube.

What is left out may be the bigger files such as, for example, the films and archives can be stored in an external hard drive.

I bought programs, including the installation of Windows or Office, can be copied to CD or DVD.

For Email ultimately it is always better to keep a copy on the remote server and use reliable services such as Gmail or Outlook.com.

 

If you use a desktop computer at home, the ideal is to buy a second internal hard drive in which to do the full backup and synchronized.

There are many software to make a full backup of the disk.

 

With recent versions of Windows then, unless you suffer a hard drive, you can always do a restore or reinstall Windows without losing data and settings.

With Windows 8 you can always carry out a recovery thanks to the new features to reinstall or reset Windows 8 from a backup.

E 'can also schedule the copy from one disk to another data automatically using programs easier and less intrusive as SyncToy to synchronize files and folders that you can not only between different disks but also between different computers connected in the network.

The difference between sync and backup is that in the first both sides are concerned then the files are identical in every part while in the backup copy is made only from one side and not vice versa.

 

In conclusion, to meet every kind of disaster or technical failure of the computer, prevention is the key to everything.

The risk of losing all the data at once is always high, even if you've been lucky enough never to have had to do.

Keep these tips is important at every level and it takes little to be more relaxed in the use of the computer, without having to take the paranoia of a virus that destroys all or that someone might delete important documents.

 

10/12/2012

----------------------------------------

Translated via software

----------------------------------------

Source:

Italian version of ReteArchitetti.it