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Day One Hardware Vs. Software DayTwo – notes Backing up your Data Day Three – notes Day Four – notes Malicious Software |
Backup your Data The first, and maybe the most important thing you can do to protect your computer is backup your data. In reality, your data IS your computer. If your computer blew up tomorrow, you could probably replace it. What you could not replace as easily is the data. Your pictures, music, documents, and anything else you have on the computer are the most difficult things to loose. This is why Backups are so important. The Hard Drive on which your data is stored is the part of the computer that is most likely to fail. Often, the Hard Drive fails without any warning! The easiest way to make backups is to buy an external Hard Drive, which plugs in using the USB port on your computer. Many of these come with special software that will automatically make backups from time to time. The thing to remember about this method though, is that the data is on another Hard Disk. The external Hard Disk is prone to failure as well. It is possible, although not very likely, that both drives could fail at the same time. Some DVD Writers also come with Backup software. I like this idea better because you can take the DVD's with your data on them and place them in a Safety Deposit Box if the information is important enough. However, if you have a lot of information, it may get spread across many disks. This can be time consuming as you need to keep changing the disk in the drive each time it fills one up. There are a couple of other ways to backup your data, but I do not know that they translate well to home use. The first is backup tapes. These can be unstable and expensive. Another method that is actually pretty good, but expensive, is an external RAID drive. RAID is a technology that uses multiple hard drives to store your data in a way that if one drive fails, it can rebuild that drive from 'extra' data it has written to the rest of the drives. The nice thing about this is that you do not have to shut down the computer when a drive fails. The computer will keep running, rebuilding the 'missing' data as needed. As soon as you plug in a new Hard Drive, it will write the missing data back to that drive. Keep in mind, that when it is running with a missing, or dead drive, if any other drive were to fail, it would lo longer be able to continue. At that point all data is lost. You do not need special software to backup your information. You can simply copy your important files to a disk yourself. What makes backup software nice is that it makes it more automatic. There is less 'forgetting' when using such software. Another difference comes in determining what to backup. The first time you make backups, you need to copy all of your data to the backups disks. After that, you really only need to copy new files, and the files you have changed. Therefore, the very first time you backup your computer, it take a lot of space to do it. But each backup after that might be rather small. Keeping track of what changed can be a pain, but this is another feature of a good backup program. It monitors new / changed files for you and knows what needs to be backed up. There are a few different methods of backing up data.
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