Avoid unlikely tragedies

You have lost your email contact list. You do not understand where your message archive has gone. You have deleted an important folder by mistake and do not know how to retrieve these business documents you need for your tomorrow’s meeting. Your hard-drive has fucked everything up and it ended up destroying your music tracks and image galleries. Let’s not extend the list of potential catastrophes you may encounter while using your PC. Let’s deal with them together! It’s time to release the back-up plan!

It is not easy to handle a PC. And sometimes, a disaster cannot be anticipated. What is important though, is to know how to react when IT tragedies happen and to always proceed with safety; because obviously you never want to ruin your important files for good. This guide will give you some tips on how to collect or retrieve data the easy way.

Go for a full-system backup

Very often, processing a system backup will be enough to retrieve all your corrupted data. Some programs actually make this task very simple and provide you with 99.9% chances to get all your files back the way they initially looked. However, we strongly advise that you acquire an external hard drive (you can find 300GB hard drives as cheap as €100.00) and plug it into your PC. By pairing it with a drive-cloning tool like Casper 4.0 or Wondershare Data Recovery, you will have the opportunity to bring a solid protection to your PC. In the event of a massive failure, a full-system backup to a plugged in external drive will be the best way to go!

Go for a remote, data-only backup

Maybe you will have no other choice – possibly because you have no external drive on hand – but backing up your critical data only might be another plausible solution. Important identity documents, financials records, invoices, diplomas, email addresses, some pictures you cannot live without, these are the data you will try to backup. Go for a remote, data-only backup does present some benefits: for instance, it takes a lot less time than a full system backup! You should consider using online backup software. They are perfect for storing data online and in most cases you will be able to storage up to 2GB for barely €5 a month.

A few online backup services that we recommend:

• iDrive: iDrive is a very user friendly type of online backup service and it offers 2GB of free storage to its users. iDrive allows you to select specific files and folders that you want to preserve. The free version is very convenient but you can upgrade to the complete version for as cheap as €5 if you like.
• MozyHome: MozyHome also provides you with 2GB of free storage. However, it uses a client software which enables you to pick both common files and important data files. MozyHome is perhaps more complete than iDrive in this regard.

We recommend going for a software that does auto-synchronization for you. However, you also have the opportunity to select programs that offer this option manually.