How to Backup your files
I am going to try really hard not to sound patronising… this is meant to be helpful after all and no-one likes being criticised.
Okay, here we go - you have to back up your stuff, regularly. Otherwise one day you will lose it and it may be important, sentimental stuff that you would really rather keep…
There are plenty of options, and most of them are free, or at least very cheap.
Online
There are tons of online services which will help you store your files. If you get a gmail account you can store up to 3GB of stuff within your email account, so you can just zip your files and send them to yourself@gmail.com and you’re done - this works up to 10MB per file so isn’t viable for very large files (eg. audio/video) or for very large amounts of storage. For photos you can use Picasa - simply upload them and you’ve got a permanent copy of all of your photos up to 1GB. If you need more than this you can purchase 7GB for $25/year.
Paid Services
- Amazon S3 provides cheap online storage - $0.15 per GB-Month of storage used
- BT provides something similar with their Digital Vault - 20GB for £4.99/month
Traditional Backup Media
- DVD - This is the easiest way to backup relatively small amounts of data (up to 4.7GB) - so good for MS Office docs, pictures but probably not for music or video. You can buy DVD-RW (re-usable) discs for about £1 each from any stationers or computer store.
- External Drives - these are now pretty affordable and are the easiest option for most people - prices change all the time but you can buy about 320GB for about £60 at dabs.com
- USB sticks - these are super cheap (2GB for £13 @ dabs.com) - ideally use this for your really important documents (and always keep a copy on one of these in addition to anything else you use)
Backup Software - there are plenty of options here - I use SyncBack - it’s free, is pretty easy to use and most importantly you can schedule it to run weekly/monthly. It’s much better than just copying the files manually using Explorer because it handles changes to files intelligently, and configurably (not sure that’s really a word).
Personally I recommend you use a combination of external drive, for day to day stuff, online storage for permanent storage of stuff which doesn’t tend to change too often (using gmail or similar) and I would also strongly recommend you use a friend’s external drive or computer to take a permanent copy offsite in case something fairly disastrous happens and you lose your DVD’s or external drive at the same time that you lose your computer.
Phone Numbers on your mobile
I know far too many people who have lost their phone and with it the numbers of their nearest and dearest - this is what you need:
Sync with Outlook
If you have a Nokia or SonyEriccson then you can download free software - I guess this is the case for most phones nowadays - which will sync your contacts with Outlook - this also means that when you add a new contact to either you won’t have to add it twice (and means you have all your contacts on your phone, which is handy
Buy a SIM backup
If you can’t / don’t want to sync with your PC then you can backup your SIM to a card - there’s a ton of options starting at under a fiver!