How to backup your data and avoid the data loss nightmare
I recently got an email from a friend that had gone through a hard drive crash and lost everything. Luckily, there wasn’t too much there she was upset about but she still wanted to know how to avoid losing information in the future. So I’m going to do a two-part posting on how to back up your data.
You can find a bunch of tutorials to that effect on the web but I’m going to try and make mine very simple.
First you’ll need a hard drive to hold the data. I prefer hard drives to dvd’s or disk media because they can hold more and hard drives are a very good buy right now. Whenever I’m going to buy any technology I usually go to two places. Either Newegg or Tiger Direct. Not only do they have great tech stuff at really good prices, but the commenting system is very valuable. I encourage you to leave a review on a product whenever you can. It makes the community stronger.
For the hard drive, I recommend the Western Digital My Book. That link goes to a 500 gig drive for under $100. You can’t beat that price and that’s a lot of storage. I like the Western Digital stuff the best because they are easy to use. Just plug it into the usb port and it starts right up.
You’ll need to reformat the drive to an NTFS format instead of its default of FAT32. Basically what the difference is that the FAT32 format woun’t let you save a file bigger than 4 gigs to the drive. After the reformat to NTFS though you’ll be golden. Just go to “MY Computer” and right click on the drive. You’ll be presented with a format option. Select that option and choose NTFS.
It’ll take a few minutes but then you’ll be ready to use the software that will save you from the data loss nightmare.
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