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Anyone who has been into PC gaming for a while now would have at some time
experienced the dreaded moment when you boot your PC up only to find it won't
start up, a quick glance into your BIOS and you see that the hard drive isn't
being detected, no matter what you do you just cant get the PC to work, you then
get the horrible realization that you have lost your hard drive, you start to have horrible thoughts
of all the programs, games, priceless photos, downloads and more that you have
now lost, you are back to square one. Obviously this can be avoided with a
simple backup of your hard drive contents, but what exactly is the best way of
backing up your hard drive files and ensuring the backup files stay safe? Below
is an analysis of the many different ways of backing up your computer
files/contents:
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Troubleshooting/Solutions
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USB Sticks: These are becoming quite common now and the size capacity
is always increasing, who would have thought years ago that a stick smaller
than a cigarette lighter would be able to hold 32 GB of data (and
increasing in capacity)
Positives
- Small in size
- Portable
- Relatively cheap
Negatives
- Can take a while to transfer files
- Easily lost because of small size
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Can be damaged easily by dropping
- Capacity limited (depends on size of
hard drive files)
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A second hard drive: Simply buying a second hard drive and setting it
to the secondary/slave HDD is a very simple way of backing up files and because of the large
capacity of new hard drives (now in the several Terabyte size) you have plenty of
room on them to back up all your hard drive files.
Positives
- Fast data transfer between hard drives
- Massive storage capacity
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Being inside your computer case less chance of damage and can't be lost
Negatives
- If system is hit by a current/voltage shock, both hard drives get
fried not just your primary one
- If your PC is hit with a virus your backup hard
drive can also be the victim
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External hard drive: External hard drives are a great alternative to
buying an internal hard drive, they are also available in large capacities and
usually cost around the same as their internal cousins.
Positives
- If your system is hit with a current or voltage shock, only your
internal HDD is effected, your external hard drive will not be affected, this is
of course assuming that its switched off or not connected (using a USB external
drive you would not need to have it on all the time, only when you are
transferring/backing up files)
Negatives
- Can be slower data transfer than an internal hard drive depending on your
system
- Can be prone to damage or accidental dropping
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DVDr media: Simply burning/writing your hard drive files with a DVD burner/writer to
a DVDr is a quick and cheap way of backing up files.
Positives
- DVDr media is very cheap
Negatives
- Limited to the size of a DVDr
- DVD's are easily broken, scratched
and lost
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Online file backup or "cloud storage": Cloud storage is
becoming more and more popular for data storage and backup, especially now with
fast internet access where upload speeds are not much of an issue these days.
Basically your data/files are stored by a third party on a server in which you
have access to 24/7.
Positives
- Your files are always backed up
- Available 24/7
- Can be accessed anywhere in the world
Negatives
- You have to pay an annual fee with most, if this is forgotten you
have lost your backup
- You never know if the company providing the backup
service could go out of business
- You never know if the company providing the backup service also
backs up
their servers, if a server crash occurs, could you lose all your files?
- Privacy issues, you do not know if the company providing the backup service
is looking at your files
- Hacking issues, the company providing the backup service could have its
servers hacked, giving hackers access to all of your data, if your data is compromised
can it be used maliciously?
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In summary your best bet of preserving your data and files is to use a
combination of the above, if you have a second internal hard drive and an
external hard drive which are both backed up to regularly, its a sure fail safe
that if one dies at least the other one will have the saved data and files on it
to be recovered. You can also use one of the many automatic backup programs
available which will back up all your files to another hard drive, this is set
to a schedule so it can be done automatically in the background or while you are
not using your PC. Don't rely on the crashed hard drive recovery programs to
always work for you, if you have the mind set that "oh well, if my hard
drive crashes I can just recover it later with these programs" this is not
always the case, a lot of the time they can't recover everything and more often
or not if the hard drives cooked then nothing can be recovered.
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