[display_podcast]
Welcome to the computers with ease podcast. Today this podcast may be a little longer than usual because I want to talk about a very important subject, which most of us including me don’t like to have to talk about and I have a story to tell you.
What do you do when you’re backup for your computer doesn’t work? This is a question that none of us want to have to answer and hope that it doesn’t happen, however as I found out recently my main computer was doing unusual things freezing computer programs were acting unusual and things were generally not working as smoothly as possible.
I thought no big deal I’ve done a backup within the last couple of days why don’t I just use my backup and restore things to the way they were and hopefully this will resolve my issues. So I went ahead in use my backup and waited the three or four hours for the backup to supposedly put all my software-and all my data back the way it was two or three days prior.
But when this process completed I found that nothing had changed that the backup had not worked at all and now my computer was in an even worse state than it was previously, so the question then becomes what does that leave me with and unfortunately for me it left me with a completely non functional computer which meant the only option that I had was to restore things back to the way the computer was that it left the factory.
Having done that because it was a last resort this meant that once I had put things back to the way they were in the beginning I had to reinstall all my programs one at a time and then I had to put back all my data files which luckily I had backed up separately just in case the worst scenario happened.
Now at this point you can imagine how unhappy I was to find out that I had to do this it took me several days to not only reinstall all my programs but to find the usernames, passwords, key codes for all the software etc. Now it I am back up and running I have to look at what should be my backup strategy from now on so that this occurrence doesn’t happen again, cross my fingers.
Having used a software program for backup purposes up till now I’m not overly happy with using that approach again but the question becomes what am I comfortable well with and what will work for me. Upon doing further research and checking with several of my colleagues a majority of my collates as well as the research indicates that there best course of action is to backup your data (i.e. the things that you create) such as Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, photos etc. what ever you create back that up somewhere separately.
Keep your program disks for all your programs as well as usernames and passwords for websites etc. in like a Excel spreadsheet or Word document can back those up with your data and not to worry about backing up your programs. What that means for you and for me is that our data is backed up and if anything should happen to the computer you have to reinstall your programs using your disks and passwords but all your dating you would be up to copy back on your computer from say an external hard drive or flash drive whatever source you used to store your individual files.
This may seem like a long and tedious process that you would do on a regular basis but after having gone through this once and realizing how unpleasant it is to lose all this material and time, I have come to the conclusion that I would prefer to backup my data and then just reinstall the software would be the easiest and least stressful of my options and not have to worry about having backup software.
What I’ve done in my case is created an Excel spreadsheet that I’ve put in my usernames and passwords my key code’s for my software and I have saved that particular spreadsheet with the rest of my data files, and I have organized my program disks in a specific location in my office so that if anything happens again I’ve got all the disks in one place.
I know where all the passwords etc are and I can quickly and efficiently put my computer back to a running state with the necessary software and data relatively quickly and efficiently. I would be very interested in knowing what other people are doing for a backup solution. Please feel free to e-mail me and let me know what solution you have implemented at darrell@computerswithease.com you can also visit my website which is www.computerswithease.com. Thank you very much.