The worst nightmare of a computer owner is losing critical data forever: a coffee spill, a power surge, a fumbled laptop. Any of these accidents can, in a single moment, lead to the loss of year's worth of documents, photos, music, and irreplaceable files.
Thanks to modern technology, even severe damage to a hard drive does not have to mean catastrophe. There are forensic laboratories capable of recovering data from hard drives that have undergone severe physical damage with remarkable success. However, these high tech services can be quite expensive, and are not guaranteed to work. They are best thought of as a last resort rather than a good safety net.
The best defense against losing your data is to back it up regularly so that the need for a high tech/high price lab never arises. There are various hardware options for backing up data, depending on the type of data and how much of it you want to back up. External hard drives are quite popular because they are not overly complicated to use and can be purchased relatively cheaply, again depending on the size of the hard drive.
Even with an external drive, human nature is to procrastinate. People fail to back up their data often enough and much of it remains vulnerable to an accident or a hard drive failure. Fortunately, there are programs, like Handy Backup, that address this problem.
Handy Backup can be set up to automatically back up your data on a customizable schedule. This has the advantage of requiring no effort or thought on the part of the user, other than setting preferences in the initial setup about when, how often, and what Handy Backup should backup.
In addition, Handy Backup can backup data to a variety of storage devices, like DVDs, thumb drives, external hard drives, or a server for a few examples. If you have valuable data, the combination of a storage device and a program like Handy Backup can save you hundreds of dollars and grant you some peace of mind.
RGB Computer Solutions sells and installs Handy Backup. We will show you how to use the software and make sure you have a backup location appropriate for your computer.