- March 28, 2024
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It's going to happen. You know it will. But still you put it off and now, disaster has struck. There's no telling what form it'll take. It could be everything from the more obviously sinister burglar or virus to that seemingly innocent (yet dastardly) glass of water. Or it could happen with a whimper, something as simple as a strange clicking noise that means your computer has become a giant paperweight.
Your computer will die. I say this having put several dozen computers out to the recycling pasture. Please trust me, its going to happen.
Imagine your hard drive — the brains of your computer — is a racetrack, with cars speeding around constantly every single day. Something bad is bound to happen eventually, and at high-speed bad things tend to go very very bad. And your hard drive is only one piece of a potential computer catastrophe. There's logic boards, graphic cards, batteries and at its most basic-level, electricity. Trust me, your machine is dead tech walking.
Now for the good news. Computer technology is getting cheaper and more powerful every single day. The machine you bought yesterday is outdated today and several hundred dollars less. What is truly valuable is your bits and bytes. You can't replace this with your credit card. You have hours, days and sometimes years of your life tied up on the information on your computer, and you'll lose it all if your computer dies, which it will.
And when it happens the only thing sadder than a dead machine is the look of fear on a user's face. No joke, people cry. Imagine that stomach-dropping feeling and please promise yourself, this won't be you.
With a few bucks and some planning, you can avoid it all.
First, buy yourself a 1TB or larger external hard drive. Both Windows 7 and Mac OSX have easy built-in software (Backup and Restore and Time Machine, respectively) for regularly backing up files on a schedule. They're different — for example Time Machine creates an hourly incremental backup — but for most users the result is the same: Your files are kept in a second place that isn't your computer's internal hard drive. Many external hard drives come with their own scheduled back up software, just make sure to choose a backup software that does scheduled backups. Use it and take the time to schedule it. Then for the next few weeks check on it to make sure its working properly. This simple step alone can save you from 95% of computer disasters.
Second, think about partitioning the external hard drive to create a clone of your hard drive in addition to the file backup. This is smart, because in most cases clones can boot up a computer for troubleshooting, even if the hard drive is dead, and can record data that may have been missed in a file backup.
Partitioning uses software to essentially split up the space on a external hard drive storage into separate parts, in this case, one for the clone and one for file backup. You can partition a drive using Window's Disk Management program and Disk Utility on the Mac. But, be careful, partitioning will whip out any data that's already on your external drive.
Once you have two halves, you should run a program to make a clone, or exact copy including invisible files, of your internal hard drive to one of the partitions you created of the external hard drive. There's a lot of good, inexpensive software that can do this. On the Mac, I use Carbon Copy Cloner ($39.95), but many people similarly swear by SuperDuper! ($27.95). On the PC. There's a number of free and low-cost programs, such as Macrium Reflect (free or $58.99 for more features), Paragon Backup and Recovery (free and $39.95 for more features) and Drive Image XML (free). Run the clone at least once and you have a powerful tool to protect yourself when your software or the hard drive runs into problems.
Three, on a PC, buy and make sure your antivirus program is running regularly. For the moment, this isn't necessary on the Apple computers.
Four, use a cloud service to back up all or part of the machine off-site. A fire, flood or burglar can easily destroy your machine and its external hard drive, leaving you with no backups. Many cloud services, such as Carbonite, CrashPlan, SOS Online Backup, SugarSync and Mozy offer individuals full-computer offsite backup in a variety of plans that can go as low as $5 a month. It is also possible to back up only your most essential data using Google Drive, Dropbox or Microsoft's SkyDrive. All three of the providers offer a few gigs of free storage space and synching of that data between computers.
Finally, set up your email program of choice using the IMAP protocol. IMAP offers a huge advantage over the more common, older POP protocol in a disaster situation because it keeps a copy of undeleted emails on the mail server. Most email providers, including the long-time hold out Outlook.com, now offer IMAP and to use it usually requires just changing the name of the incoming mail server.
Do these simple steps today. And when you're computer finally dies, reward yourself with something faster and better.
Sean Roth is a self-professed geek. When he's not following real estate and businesses for the Business Observer, he's musing about the latest doohickey.