One piece of advice - BACKUP.
You know the old Baz Luhrmann song, (Everybody’s Free to) Wear Sunscreen, well the IT equivalent of this, if there were to be such a tedious song, would be ‘Backup your stuff’. I can’t say it often enough, backup, backup, backup and when you’re finished backup again.
Did you get that? BACKUP, now, immediately, if not sooner.
If you’ve never had the sinking feeling of realising that your last hour, day, week or even year – insert as applicable – of work has just disappeared into a big black hole then you’ll not really know what I’m talking about, but take my word for it – you never want it to happen.
You must backup your documents, you simply cannot trust that your hard drive will never fail, you will not be hit by a virus (even if you’ve got anti-virus protection), you’ll not be invaded by malware, your laptop will never be stolen or myriad other things that can cause documents to mysteriously go missing.
It’s simply not worth the risk. If you have any value at all in your documents, photos, music, etc. then you should have at the very least two copies of them, preferrably in two different locations, but lets try for a very simple on-site backup first.
The best way to do an onsite backup is to get a high volume external hard drive (or even a high volume USB key could be used these days, depending on how many documents need to be backed up). You can then set up backup or synchronisation software to make sure that your documents are backed up regularly.
One of the better programs, and an entirely free one at that, is Alway Sync, which you can download free for personal use on the website.
Just be aware that this is ‘synchronisation software’ not ‘backup software’, there is a difference. Backup software will take a copy of what is in the destination folder (say your My Documents folder) and copy that to another location, so that the other location has a copy of what is currently in your My Documents folder.
Synchronisation software ensures that the copies at both the source and destination are the same, so if you change files or folders in the destination (say a backup on an external hard drive) then the source files (My Documents for instance) will also be changed to mirror that alteration. Synchronisation software is ideal for updating your PC from your laptop to ensure that you have the most up to date version of documents on both, for example.
FBackup4 is an example of good, easy to use, free backup software.
Free Backup Software
If you are having difficulties setting up backup or synchronisation software or hardware (or want to locate some backup hardware) then we can certainly be of assistance. Do give us a call and we’ll be able to sort it out for you.
We can also help if you’ve lost documents and are not sure what has happened to them. It is sometimes possible to recover the files, depending on what has caused the loss.
