How to Backup a Hard Drive

Video Transcript

"Hi. I'm Chris Bryce with superservice.com and I'd like to speak to you about how to back up a hard drive. There's a few different ways to back up a hard drive and I'll go over those right now, and then what my opinion is the best way to go about it. Now, in the old days they used to back up things on tape backup drives. That's still used somewhat today, but they're fairly unreliable and because the tapes are based on tension different weather incremental changes can cause those tapes to loose or gain tension and then your data can be destroyed permanently so I tend to steer away from the tape backup method. The other two ways that are most common are hard drive backups where you would have an external hard drive that you would back all your information up to, and then also CDs or DVDs. Let's look at the hard drive approach for now. If you're wanting to back up your hard drive one of the main reasons you're wanting to back it up is in case you have a problem with either software or hardware failure on your drive. If that's the case then you're going to want to have your data in a secure area. If you have a problem with your hard drive and you're backing up to an external hard drive, the thing to keep in mind is what if that external hard drive goes bad. You've only got your data backed up in one location and you may have years of data backed up on that one external hard drive and if it goes bad as well as your main hard drive then you're pretty much out of luck. If you choose to go the CD or DVD route I tend to look at the DVDs because they hold more information. If you do the DVDs I recommend backing up one to four times a month, either every week or once a month. Now you can even go as much as backing up every single day, but here's the key that I'm going to mention to you. When you're backing up, when you use the DVDs, I would only recommend using that same DVD and writing over it for a period of about a week or two. Now, if you're doing the backup once a month then every month I would use a different backup disk. What this accomplishes is if one of those DVDs happens to go bad, well then you've still got backup information that's good from either a month ago or even as soon as a week ago. You don't loose all of your years of information like you would with a removable hard drive. So that's the best way in my opinion to back up your computers by using DVDs. To do this all you would do is simply insert a blank DVD into your computer, or if you've already written on the DVD you can still insert that, and it will pop up with a wizard that will ask you if you want to save data files or music files or backup your computer. You'll simply choose to backup your computer, select the files you'd like to backup, it'll write those on the DVD and you're ready to go, and those are the best ways to back up your computer or your hard drive."