Take a minute and backup

posted: 2014-07-28
Take a minute and backup - Courchevel Enquirer
Jenny Jones, good snowboarder, crap at backing up.
In the news recently a certain blonde Olympic bronze medalist had her Macbook air stolen. Looking past the fact that she left this expensive computer in the car, in London, the most valuable part of the computer was not the aluminium unibody laptop but her Olympic photos stored on the hard drive.

Over the years I have had many people who have lost their life history as their hard drive gives up the ghost.

As the hard drive, in most older computers, is the only mechanical device in the computer it is far more prone to damage than anything else. Newer (higher end) computers use what are called solid sate drives, that in layman’s terms are like large USB thumb drives inside the computer. They are more reliable and less susceptible to impact damage but still very steal able.

To safeguard against this all the data needs to be backed up, and backed up regularly! (at least once every week) To either an external hard drive or, even better, to the cloud.

Both Apple (time machine) and Microsoft both have built in backup software which automatically backup any changed data whenever the external hard drive is plugged in.

If that is too complicated then Microsoft (One drive), Google (Google drive) and Apple (icloud*) all offer online storage for saving stuff to the “cloud”. Even better news is that, as they are competing against each other, the amount of free storage is regularly growing, currently around 15-20GB dwarfing the amount offered by Dropbox 2GB.

Another benefit to backing up to the cloud is that your data is available wherever you in the world.

• Icloud will offer online storage later this year.

So regardless of if you are an X games or Olympic medalist, safeguard your data so those memories will be with you forever.