OK, let's have some
fun. Pickup your .45 caliber Colt, chamber a round and let fly right smack
dab into the middle of my hard drive. Go ahead. Don't bother me none. I got
backup! ... DO YOU?
OK, now let's face it. How many of you
backup your hard drive or computer on a regular basis? If you have any of
the following in your computer... think about the second segment of this
article.
| |
| WINDOWS OPERATING SYSTEM |
| PROGRAMS (Microsoft word,
Quicken or Quick Books, Works, Photo software, AntiVirus, etc.) |
| GAMES |
| PHOTOS |
| MUSIC |
| ACCOUNTING DATA |
| CLIENT'S INFORMATION OR DATA |
| ADDRESS BOOK AND CONTACTS |
| EMAIL |
| DOCUMENTS |
Now we'll use a
little imagination. Read below then close your eyes and imagine these
scenarios.
|
1.
You've just finished your year end taxes or the last chapter of the book
you've been working on for three years or you just downloaded the last
of your 10,000 music hits you've been collecting. You turn your computer
off and leave the room. Next morning you turn on your computer and
receive an error message like "Boot disk error" or "No operating system
found" or "No hard drive found". Do you know what these error messages
usually mean?... Your HARD DRIVE has probably crashed. Gone south! No
hard drive, no data, no music, no photos, no documents! Gone forever!
Never to be recovered! Nada! Zip! Zilch! Years of work, saving,
building, collecting, all gone over night. Hard drives are made by
humans, for humans. They're going to break! Eventually, not when and if,
THEY WILL FAIL! Are you prepared to loose everything and start over?
2.
You
come home after an evening out with your spouse. Dinner was great. Good
flick. Ready to relax in your favorite chair. You open the door and stop
in terror. Your house has been ransacked by burglars. Stuff everywhere.
You run to the bedroom, jewelry gone, coins and personal items gone.
Then you stare in disbelief... Stereo, TV and computer gone too.
Everything you've had, worked on, collected for years. GONE! Do you have
a backup?... NO!... Oh oh! So, you have insurance but will the insurance
company replace all your data? Nope. They'll replace the hardware, TV,
stereo and pay you cash for the jewelry, coins, etc. but your computer
data is gone forever!
3.
You
wake up in the middle of the night. Smoke or fire alarm blaring. Wake
the rest of the family and all get out safely. After the fire is out and
you get to look through the remains you find a puddle of melted metal
and plastic where your computer used to be. You doubt that you'll be
using that hard drive again. Do you have a backup?... NO!... Oh oh
again! |
BACK, BACK, BACKUP! Backups are not
that hard. If you don't backup your hard drive or data you're gonn'a be
sorry. Sooner or later that computer or hard drive will fail. Nothing runs
or lasts forever. And if you use a computer on a regular basis like we all
do, you have most of your household and/or business data on that hard drive.
There are different types of backups. The two
most common are a Full System Backup and a Data Backup.
FULL SYSTEM BACKUP
A full system backup is just that. The backup contains
ALL the information on your hard drive. From the operating system and
software programs to
the data, your pictures and music. If you have a catastrophic crash, if your computer is stolen or is
destroyed by fire, this backup hard drive can be inserted into your existing
or new computer and with very little effort, you can be back up and running
with everything that you had as of the last backup. Usually this type of
backup is on another hard drive. Although, depending on how much is on your
hard drive, it can be on a CD a DVD or multiple disks as a drive image. This
is the the best backup to insure quickly restoring your computer back to
normal. DATA
BACKUP
This is the least expensive but the most difficult and time
consuming to recover and restore from. With a data backup you use your
floppy drive or CD burner to copy or backup your important data. This
includes your accounting
data, documents, spread sheets, photos, music, etc.
Most computers now already have, and come with, a CD Burner and burning or
recording software. With this type of backup you have all your data backed
up but you must reinstall the Windows operating system, all software programs and
Internet software again then restore your backed up data.
TIP: Which
ever backup you use, when you finish the backup, remove the media from the
computer. Put in in your vehicle, in another location or leave it with a
friend or neighbor. This way the burglar won't take it too and a fire won't
destroy it along with the computer. After all... what's the sense in doing
the backup if the backup is gone also?
SBC can answer your questions and provide you with a backup system that
fills your needs. Call us for a free consultation. |
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