The one thing I can not stress enough to all my friends is to make sure you always back up your data. My general recommendation is to use an external hard drive to back your system and data to. I would say that it`s best to use at least a 1tb external hard drive. This is because there are so many updates coming through that smaller drives fill up too fast. Some examples of back up drives can be seen below.
The external hard drive enclosure is seen just above. With this type you can purchase a hard drive of your choice and mount it inside the enclosure. This is a nice option, because if the drive goes bad you can replace the drive or if the enclosure goes bad you can replace that as well.
Another way of backing up your data is to the cloud. here is a good link with helpful information http://www.pcworld.com/article/223354/choosing_cloud_backup_for_pcs.html . There is also carbonite which is an online back up service that is available to pc users as well as mac users. It can back up all your data. There are different packages available. Some packages do not make a mirror back up of your hard drive. Other types of back ups are using a program such as Nortons Ghost to make an exact image of your hard drive as well as the data to an external hard drive. The back up program in windows 7 does work very well.
I would advise never to back up to your hard drive in the computer to the main drive. I have seen people back up to the recovery partition and fill it up. You could however install a second hard drive in the computer case and back up to that. With programs such as Nortons Ghost you do have to make sure it is set for incremental backing up. This way it will do so many back ups and then remove the older ones. This way it does not keep piling up the back ups and then fill the drive. I remember one situation where the person did not realize it and the drive was filled and had not backed up since two months when it was full, therefore he lost two months of data.
Some simple ways of backing up data are to a flash drive. Generally you will be performing the copy and paste routine. The problem with this is a flash drive is not very large and will run out of space. It is good for small amounts of data.
So just remember it is better to back up your system and data, because you never know what will happen. It can be anything from a defective hard drive to a bad virus such as the crypto locker virus.
Thank You for reading. Any comments or information are always welcomed.
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