Your hard drive is where all your documents, pictures, videos and all the files on your computer is stored. What would happen if your hard drive failed or you get a virus that encrypts your data? Remember, even if you have a MAC, they have now had a virus that encrypts your data recently. Do you have a backup of your data? Can you afford to potentially lose all your files?
There are many methods for backing up your data. You could get a flash drive and manually back up your data, save the info on CD/DVDs, or use cloud backup.
Flash drive backups are a great inexpensive way to make backups. They do involve copying the files across each time you want to make a backup though and that takes your time. If your files don’t change often, then this method would be the best method for you.
CD/DVD backups require you to burn your data to the disk. Once burned, you can’t edit these disks again. This is probably the most time consuming and expensive backup of these three. Of course, you can burn to the same CD-r/DVD-r, but I highly recommend against that and will personally not purchase those type of discs.
We offer a cloud backup to our customers. We install the software and the each night if will run. The initial setup can take quite sometime to upload all your data, depending on what you want backed up. Once the initial backup is done, it is usually pretty quick at making your incremental backups after that. Then if your computer crashes, you have a fire or water damage and the hard drive is destroyed, you still have your backup.
How you backup your data is a decision you will have to make, or are you willing to possibly lose all your data? If you are interested in our cloud service, give us a call and we can help you with it and get it setup for you.
If you have already had a hard drive start to fail, give us a call, we can sometimes recover data from falling hard drives. If your computer does not start, we still have the ability to recover your files so if you need your files, give us a call at 218-744-1210 before you write over your documents. Of course, there is no guarantee to the recovery of the data, but we have a fairly successful track record.
A couple ways you might be able to tell your hard drive is failing is if you start hear a ticking sound or if your computer all the sudden slows way down. If it slows way down very quickly, it could be hard drive sectors starting to fail, malware/virus or many things, but it is always a good idea to get your hard drive tested to make sure.