http://people.bakersfield.com/home/Blog/MSgherzi/5803 We all use computers for many activities. Some use it for entertainment purposes or keeping in touch with friends or family, while others may use it as their primary business tool to store their critical information. Whatever the reason may be, your data is very important to you and losing it, especially in a business environment, can really be frustrating.PCs can become infected with Viruses or Spyware that can possibly wipe out many files on your hard drive, or perhaps you may have accidentally deleted files you thought you would never have any intended use for again. When in the future you find out you really did need those files, this is when using computers for storing data can put a hamper on you and your work. Which is why backing up your data could never be less important.But there are ways to back up your data safely, and there are ways to back up your data which are not safe. The easiest ways of safely backing up your data easily is to buy a CD with a large quantity of free disk space available or possibly think of investing in an external hard drive that is compatible with your USB which will be large enough to hold your data. Even using web sites with uploading services are a great free alternative. Depending on a user's storing habits, every two to four weeks would be a great time to backup data on your PC. Every user that is using their PC on a regular basis and has a lot of important or confidential data, needs to be backed up routinely.Bad habits users pickup is when their data actually is gone. They then make an attempt to recover it.This is obviously a no-brainer since you would like to recover as much of the lost data as possible, but to avoid this you can back it up before hand. Running off and trying different methods and paying hundreds if not thousands to try and get as much data recovered as possible is not a smart user.If you were to back up your data in the first place you would not be worried about this problem. So basically there really is no "bad" way of backing up data. Anyway an individual makes an attempt to back up any sort of information is a good thing. Unless obviously they just store it on another computer as that can obviously crash or lose data just as easily. And yes, even Macs.So remember, we have CD's/DVD's, HDD's (hard drives), thumb/usb drives, large email accounts, free online file manager accounts, and perhaps the built in windows option to backup data.However, those are all great ways to backup data, I would rather recommend hardware rather than online accounts. Because anything can happen to an account somewhere online, a glitch, a flaw of some sort. Atleast if your information is stored on hard copy there isn't much that can happen to it other than perhaps an unfortunate event or natural disaster that would destroy it. I hope some of you have learned something new from the article, I plan to write more about security related topics in the future. We all use computers for many activities. Some use it for entertainment purposes or keeping in touch with friends or family, while others may use it as their primary business tool to store their critical information. Whatever the reason may be, your data is very important to you and losing it, especially in a business environment, can really be frustrating.PCs can become infected with Viruses or Spyware that can possibly wipe out many files on your hard drive, or perhaps you may have accidentally deleted files you thought you would never have any intended use for again. When in the future you find out you really did need those files, this is when using computers for storing data can put a hamper on you and your work. Which is why backing up your data could never be less important.But there are ways to back up your data safely, and there are ways to back up your data which are not safe. The easiest ways of safely backing up your data easily is to buy a CD with a large quantity of free disk space available or possibly think of investing in an external hard drive that is compatible with your USB which will be large enough to hold your data. Even using web sites with uploading services are a great free alternative. Depending on a user's storing habits, every two to four weeks would be a great time to backup data on your PC. Every user that is using their PC on a regular basis and has a lot of important or confidential data, needs to be backed up routinely.Bad habits users pickup is when their data actually is gone. They then make an attempt to recover it.This is obviously a no-brainer since you would like to recover as much of the lost data as possible, but to avoid this you can back it up before hand. Running off and trying different methods and paying hundreds if not thousands to try and get as much data recovered as possible is not a smart user.If you were to back up your data in the first place you would not be worried about this problem. So basically there really is no "bad" way of backing up data. Anyway an individual makes an attempt to back up any sort of information is a good thing. Unless obviously they just store it on another computer as that can obviously crash or lose data just as easily. And yes, even Macs.So remember, we have CD's/DVD's, HDD's (hard drives), thumb/usb drives, large email accounts, free online file manager accounts, and perhaps the built in windows option to backup data.However, those are all great ways to backup data, I would rather recommend hardware rather than online accounts. Because anything can happen to an account somewhere online, a glitch, a flaw of some sort. Atleast if your information is stored on hard copy there isn't much that can happen to it other than perhaps an unfortunate event or natural disaster that would destroy it. I hope some of you have learned something new from the article, I plan to write more about security related topics in the future. en-us Wed, 14 Feb 2007 18:29:20 PST Easiest of all: dual/mirror drives http://people.bakersfield.com/home/Blog/MSgherzi/5803/#c_58442 http://people.bakersfield.com/home/Blog/MSgherzi/5803/#c_58442 Easiest of all: dual/mirror drives Retrospect is a good backup program and can be scheduled to backup automatically. Backing up to a striped RAID storage devise is also a good way to go if you have a LOT of data. http://people.bakersfield.com/home/Blog/MSgherzi/5803/#c_58457 http://people.bakersfield.com/home/Blog/MSgherzi/5803/#c_58457 Retrospect is a good backup program and can be scheduled to backup automatically. Backing up to a striped RAID storage devise is also a good way to go if you have a LOT of data. I've got an external hardrive for my laptop.  BTW, I'm going to throw out a tech question here:  My girlfriend have a  computer with a partitioned hard drive.  I'm trying to unpartition it.  Any good suggestions? http://people.bakersfield.com/home/Blog/MSgherzi/5803/#c_58677 http://people.bakersfield.com/home/Blog/MSgherzi/5803/#c_58677 I've got an external hardrive for my laptop.  BTW, I'm going to throw out a tech question here:  My girlfriend have a  computer with a partitioned hard drive.  I'm trying to unpartition it.  Any good suggestions? TomW, in your case I would give Partition Magic a try. Here is the link: http://www.soft32.com/download_151.html http://people.bakersfield.com/home/Blog/MSgherzi/5803/#c_58717 http://people.bakersfield.com/home/Blog/MSgherzi/5803/#c_58717 TomW, in your case I would give Partition Magic a try. Here is the link: http://www.soft32.com/download_151.html