OAG NEPAL

Does your computer keep freezing, turning off or making funny noises? There are solutions to some of these problems that most people don’t know about.

We’ve all been in a situation where we have lost work. Whether it was a few sentences or a full document, the feeling is never all that nice. But imagine if you lost all of your work. By all I mean everything – every file, every photo and everything you have ever done on your computer since you bought it.

As a society we don’t usually like to think about the negatives, but this is risk management 101. If you think about the risks, you can plan for them and work to prevent them. It is inevitable that your computer will die one day and whether you lose your work or not depends on if and when you have backed it up.

The definition of backing-up your work is to essentially make a spare copy of your document or files and store them separately to the originals.

What data should you back-up?

Some people will have you believe that you need to back-up every single file on your computer. This is not the case. The choice of what to back-up and what not to is a personal one, but as a general rule you should back-up (at the very least) the following:

• Banking and financial information and files
• Digital photos
• Music and software that has been purchased/downloaded from the internet
• Email contact list
• Internet browser bookmarks
• Other important files and documents including work/school projects

How often should you back-up?

Although our lives are filled to the brim with family and social obligations, there is no excuse when it comes to backing-up your files. When and how often you do this depends on how often you use your computer. If you use your computer more than 15 hours a week you need to be backing-up your system once every week.

If you are using it less, fortnightly may be enough.

If you are using an old computer it would be wise to back-up all important documents and projects as you make changes to them so you are always guaranteed to have a copy of them just in case your computer dies.

How should you back-up?

You can use a number of devices to back-up your computer documents and files. Which one you choose to use will depend on how many documents and files you wish to back-up.

For anything under 1.44MB, you can use a floppy disk. While the floppy disc is becoming less common, it is suitable for small file back-ups like important documents or letters.

For anything from 1GB to 16GB, you can use a USB memory sticks. These compact little devices are simple to use and great for backing up your data.

CD/DVD writers are also becoming a common device for backing-up documents and files, holding up to 3.4GB.  ZIP drives are also extremely popular, holding up to 750MB.

Unfortunately all of these options depend on your reliability to actually conduct the back-up. If you are thinking that this could be a problem you may like to contact an IT company that offers an offsite back-up service that includes disaster recovery storage.