In this month’s Cyber Chat, Rie shares his wisdom on the importance of backing up your data…
| Now you may not have some arcane scroll that holds the secrets of Alchemy to keep safe (see side bar), but I would bet pounds to peanuts that you do have happy snaps of your nearest and dearest, that favourite puppy or that once in a lifetime trip you took that bring you such pleasure to reminisce over. Maybe it’s that family tree you’ve been working on or that spreadsheet you’ve been working on that all the ‘soccer mums’ depend on.
What is a “Backup”? Simply put, it is taking a copy of something on your computer/device and putting it somewhere else for safe keeping. Now where would you keep a copy of those pictures of little Jonny’s first steps? Here are a couple of places for you, but it is by no means exhaustive. 1 I know the new word is ‘device’ but I am a bit of a curmudgeon. Did you know your smart phone has much more power than the computers that sent man to the moon? USB drive You may have seen one of these. They come in many sizes, both physical (lozenge to brick) and logical (up to terabytes2 in size). 2 By the way, 1 terabyte sounds like something out of Harry Potter but is a unit of size. For normal people, 1 Terabyte is about ¼ million photos taken on your phone or 6½ million pages of PDFs/Word/presentations. The Cloud “The Cloud” is a place where you can place data on the Internet. That just means that there is a place on the internet, where you can copy your files. You may have heard of Drop Box, Goole Drive or OneDrive. They are the same sort of thing and it is possible to get this storage for free. These are often called Cloud Drives. How do you make a backup? There are many free software packages for you to make a backup they may help but for years, I just copy the files from one place to another on a regular basis using the explorer (that’s the program that lets you look at the C: drive and all the sub directories). One final thing… There is a 3-2-1 rule that you might want to follow, just to be extra safe. 3 Copies of a file on… 2 Separate media and… 1 Copy on a Cloud Drive
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Backing up data in times gone by
You may have heard of the Great Library of Alexandria, the largest and most significant library in the ancient world. The story goes that every ship that came into port was searched for scrolls and manuscripts & if any were found, they were taken away to be copied. The original was kept to be stored in the library and the copy was given to the original owner. The library had the equivalent of over 100,000 books at its zenith. Arguments about Civil rights and “Who’s King!” aside, here is an ancient example or somebody taking a backup. If the ship carrying the scroll was lost at sea, the scroll would now reside in “Davy Jones’ locker” but, and this is the point, the knowledge (think data) was still available. |