Pensacola Computer Help Technoblog

I can’t tell you how many times people come to me because their computers have crashed, and they have no recent backups. Except for the newest solid state hard drives, all hard drives will fail – ALWAYS. They are mechanical devices, and as such they wear out. Laptop drives are especially prone to quick failure due to heat and shocks that are not such a problem for desktops.

While most people ‘understand’ the need for backing up important data, it often becomes one of those things that is forgotten. Many people, have files that are not replaceable such as pictures, and certain documents. It is very important to back these files up regularly – but what if you forget? If a drive become corrupted, the data can sometimes be recovered by means of software. If a drive is physically damaged, the only option is then a data recovery service which costs $$$$$$.

So, what to do? The best, and often easiest (and depending on the amount of data, possibly the cheapest) backup solution is online backup. There are companies like iDrive.com that provide a certain amount of free online storage (2 GB currently), along with a handy Windows application that runs in the background and does all the work for you. I highly recommend online backup because with it, your files can be accessed by you securely from any computer.

The time to get your backups done is NOW – a hard drive can crash at any time, and many times without much of a warning. Don’t wait until it is to late – Backup, Backup, and Backup

Technology is a wonderful thing – when it works FOR you. Unfortunately, this isn’t always the case. Many times we find ourselves working harder just to use the technology, rather than having the technology we use making things easier.

So, what can we do to change things? Well, the key lies in knowing what works, and how it works. Unfortunately, some things in the technical world just aren’t that intuitive, they are not designed to be user friendly. When faced with such technology, the best thing to do is take the learning approach – and by this I don’t mean jump right in there and plug along, but rather take some initial time to search for some understandable documentation. Sometimes (not often enough it seems), this can be found in the supplied Help documentation – I can’t tell you how many times people never look at help (on most ‘good’ Windows programs, help can easily be found by pressing the F1 key. If that doesn’t do it, there is always the wonderful web, which is full of actual useful information for most technology out there.

You can bet that if something is confusing to you, hard to understand, and just doesn’t make sense, that it was probably that way for other people, and more than likely someone out there has taken the time to explain it in a way that is understandable.