Over the past day or so I have spent a fair amount of time piecing back together my home computer system (at least one of them, I have a veritable cornucopia of systems). This system is very important in that it is the center of my computing universe, in that it holds a great deal of important data, so after resurrecting the system I will dole out a little bit of home spun home computing advice, about the importance of backups.
First and foremost, ensure you have backups of your data and your system. This is crucial to any and all of your systems, if you don’t have backups (and hopefully they can restore as well) you will have to rebuild a dead system from scratch (and lose your personal settings).
- Back up your system image onto another disk, on your system (preferably external, but not on the same disk as your operating system is on). Make sure your backups are working as well (check your logs).
- If you have important data, back this information up or make it safe in some fashion. Copy the data onto another disk, another system, onto a network server or have a home Network Access Storage box (NAS). Make sure your back ups are secure, but again, make sure this back up is running as well.
- This will also protect you from Virus’ and Ransomware too.
Create an operating system rescue disk (depending on what OS you are running) or keep the original Operating System disks you used to install the system (or the ones that came when you bought the system). These are essential in repairing your system as well. If you threw these out, you will need to find them or recreate them (or simply buy a new system).
Have all the Serial Numbers for your: Operating System, Anti Virus System, and all Software that you bought. These are essential as well if you have to recover after a partial system failure (yes this happens as well).
Ensure your system is running System Optimization is running to defragment your disks and check for errors as well.
What Do You Really Need
Finally, maybe what you need is a Guy (or Gal) who really loves futzing around with technology that can come over and help you set all of this up. I used to be “the Guy” for a few people in terms of helping them with technology, but I think now I am mostly just “the Guy” for my family’s computers, but that is fine as well.
I use Backblaze for off site back up. It has worked well, and if you have a fast enough internet connection, it works nicely.
A couple of other things to remember:
Multiple copies – Don’t move files to an external hard drive (with it being the only copy). The external drive can fail too, taking your precious data with it. External hard drives should be a second (or third) copy of your data.
Offsite backups – A basement flood or house fire can destroy your computer, and backups. Keep a copy of the data at work / friend’s house / in the cloud. If your main computer and offsite copy are destroyed by the same event, then your backups are the last thing you need to worry about 🙂
Test your backups – The moment you need them isn’t the time to find out your backups don’t work.
Focus on the data – Everything else is replaceable (Operating system, software). Protect the important data first (pictures, irreplaceable documents, videos, license keys).