If you are anything like me, I have a lot of personal files on my home computer. I have 150Gb just in photos alone. I recently had a hard drive fail, and it failed pretty bad. I was unable to recover the files through basic means. Re-installing the operating system is one thing to deal with, but loosing personal files is devastating. Fortunately I have a personal backup plan.
A personal backup plan is something that everyone with a personal computer should have. It can be simple or complex. I used to use a separate internal disk drive with a script I setup in the scheduler to run every day. This isn’t too bad, but in a recent move the drive I used for this crashed and didn’t even power on any more. Additionally if we were to have a catastrophic event such as a flood or fire we would loose both the primary and backup. This is pretty rare, but does happen and it is something I have my home insured for, but nobody really thinks to insure their personal files and photos.
Fortunately there are a number of services available to handle backups. I decided about a year ago to use a backup service. I am using Carbonite to handle my backups. Their service is fairly reasonable in price and easy to setup and use. Once I did the original configuration I don’t have to think about it anymore. It just quietly backs up everything in my personal folders and a few others I manually added through their Explorer extensions.
So now back to my personal backup plan. Once I put the operating system back on and a few of my more common applications like Office, iTunes, etc. I started the restore process. It is all managed through the Internet so a good broadband connection is required but most people have that. I logged into Carbonite and selected to install the software and it connected up right away and started the download process. I have over 190Gb on this service, so it’s going to take a few days to get it all back, but I AM going to get it all back.
A good backup strategy should be something every computer user has. It is just one of those basic services everyone should have.
Hi Bill Leeper,
There is some issues with Carbonite. The data backup service only works for documents, photos, music files, email. But, Videos, programs files, and large individual files need to be selected for backup manually. There is not Automated Backup for these files.