There is a sickly feeling that comes over you when you go to open an important file and the computer says “File Not Found.”
“It was just there yesterday!” You yell frantically to the machine, but that cold metal box has no empathy for your loss.
“Ah ha,” you think as you reach for your flash drive that has a copy of that precious file. Now, I will explain to you how you can have this copy so you to will not have to experience that sickly, sinking feeling.
They only safe you can ensure you keep your data is to make multiple copies across multiple devices. You want to have your most important files in at least two different spots, maybe one on your computer and another on a flash drive or even another computer. If you make multiple copies and just keep them on the same device, then you aren’t really covered if there is a hardware failure.
Let’s say we need to back up our Word document file “Ancestry.docx.” There are myriad ways to go about this, and I will walk you through two of the simplest — the first being just making regular manual copies of the file to another device. For a second device to store the document, you can use a flash drive, external hard drive or even another computer.
In my humble opinion, the easiest way to back up a document would to just be to email it to myself after every time I update it. This keeps it on the server that hosts my email and, therefore, I can get on any computer at any time and access that email.
Our second manual option for one of the external media devices is to plug that device in to your computer. Once there, you should get a popup asking if you want to view the files on that media device — select yes.
You can then see everything on that device, right-click on “Ancestry.docx” in your Documents folder and select “copy.” Go back to that external media device, right-click anywhere inside of that folder and select “paste.” Voila! Backup completed and “Ancestry.docx” is saved again!
We have a second option to back up our important file, but this time we can set it to go automatically! We can use a backup program to automatically backup our files to external media whenever we want to schedule it. This process is a little more complicated and, if it is something you are interested in, give us a call at Eagle Technology Solutions and any of our qualified technicians can help you out.
Call or email at 785.628.1330 or [email protected].