By now, everyone has heard about and has at least a basic understanding of the importance of backing up your data. What many people do not know is how to go about doing this.

While there are many methods available, the best piece of advice that I can offer would be that any sort of back-up at all is better than nothing. If you are concerned with accidentally messing up a formula in a spreadsheet, ruining your PowerPoint presentation, or doing something terrible to an html file that you are editing, simply having a second copy of it would be sufficient. If the file you are working on is named “presentation” you could name the back-up “presentation-backup” and then proceed to work on the presentation. Then, when you have made some changes and are ending your work for the time being, you can create delete the back-up and create a new copy of the presentation to be your back-up so that your most recent changes are also backed up.

However, this will not protect you against some sort of disk failure. For this reason, many people will have multiple copies of whatever they are working on in multiple locations such as on a flash drive, on their hard drive and in their email.

When it comes to backing up files for long term storage or archiving data, there are different approaches that might be just as if not more suitable. Examples of things you may want to archive would include complex projects you have worked on in the past and pictures.

One of the most common ways to archive data is to put it on a CD and then put the CD in a safe place. A recommendation with this method would be to also keep it on a hard drive of some sort (either on your computer or a network hard drive that you store data on) so that the files will still be easily accessible should you happen to need to refer them for some reason. This will also help to protect the disk so it will be more likely to work should you ever really need it to get the data because it will not be suffering the “wear and tear” of a disk that is regularly used.

Having them on a disk though, helps protect you from losing the data should something happen to the drive. Here again, having multiple copies of the data can be beneficial. Perhaps, if you made two copies of the disk you could store one at your house and the second one at work or at the house of a relative to help minimize the risk of the data being lost or destroyed.

While these are probably the two most common needs for the average user and very simple solutions, they can be very effective in many cases. Having said that, there are many other situations where the backing-up of data can be very important and possibly more important than the situations discussed here. Likewise, there are also many other methods that can be used to back up data.

When it comes to backing up data, there is really no wrong way to do it. Yes, some methods may be better than others, but having any back-up at all is better than not having one.

If you have methods of backing up data that you feel are effective or ineffective, I’d like to know. Leave a comment and share your thoughts.