Keep important data safe on your laptop or PC

This is an article containing information on ways to keep your most important data safe on your laptop or PC. This could be Photos, Files, Contacts or in fact your whole hard drive. The idea behind this is that Prevention is better than cure. When your hard Drive crashes, as it inevitably will, the cost to recover it will far outweigh the cost of keeping a back of it in the first place.

Before we get into the options I'd like to give you one piece of advice. Which ever method you choose, the data you save should be a duplicate of the original. In other words don't buy an External Hard Drive and just use it as extra space. This defeats the object of the exercise as you still don't have a copy. the External Hard Drive could fail and you've actually achieved nothing in terms of making a backup. This applies to whichever method you choose.Backup To Disk

If you have a CD or DVD drive that can record as well as play discs then you can use these discs to create a backup. Bear in mind that CDs don't hold as much as DVDs so you may use plenty of disks. Also it's a good idea to use rewritable disks as you need to backup on a regular basis so you would need many "record once" disks. So using rewritable disks is the cheaper option in the long run.Backup To External Hard Drive. You can review our Laptopslab to get the review of best laptops for buying.

this is an easy option and they can be sourced relatively cheaply compared to the cost of a recovery from a failed Hard Drive at a later date. You can use Software to create a regular backup so you don't forget.Backup To A Memory Stick

As the size of memory sticks gets larger so the price comes down. Make sure you pick one which is double the size of your current requirements as you will inevitably be adding more and more data to it.Backup To An Online Repository. You can try our most expensive videocard for your laptops and PC.

This is a good option as the repository will be backed up by the company which provides the space. It can be expensive so shop around. This option can only be used if you are online and please bear in mind that it could take a while to upload as a standard ADSL connection works much faster when downloading than uploading.