Have you been Backing Up your System?

June 10, 2009 Computer Tips And Tricks

Everyone nowadays has or owns a computer. We listen to music, play games, watch movies, store all our photos, etc hp-hdd and of course work from our computers. Backing up your computer is very important. If something happens to your computer you at least have the data backed up.

There are two options when it comes to backing up to a hard drive, internal or external. The internal option is a flavor of RAID. This will be explained to you.

RAID1 – Adding a second, identical hard drive to your computer in a RAID1 array is a viable option. If you have a Mac or use a *nix variant, no additional hardware is necessary. It is believed that the top tier of Vista also has built-in software RAID support. What a mirrored RAID does is just that; it mirrors the contents of one drive to a second drive. You have two identical copies of your data at all times. If one of the drives in the RAID fails, you have your data intact on the other drive.
External drive – External drives will set you back more than an internal, not by much though. USB works fine. Firewire and/or E-SATA is faster and will up the price of the external drive, and in the case of E-SATA, you will also need an E-SATA card.

Backup software for an external is probably built into your operating system. There are third party software solutions that create bootable clones for you system. If the backup software is smart, after the initial clone, when it backs up it will compare the information on both drives, only adding/subtracting/modifying the information that is new or changed since the last backup. This makes for speedier backups, and is a nice feature.