Managing Data On Your Home Computers

What is my data?

Your computer is probably one of the most frequently used thing in your home today. You probably have several of them too. What do you do with them?

Gone are the days when you used the computer to write an occasional letter, work on a spreadsheet, print some labels, work on emails and browse the internet. Today, in addition to all that, you are very likely using your PC to manage your finances, work on your taxes, store loads of digital pictures and video from the camcorders, download music, games and other software. All this is your personal “data.” If you have multiple computers, then you probably have your data all over the place.

So what about it?

How often have you wished that the picture you were looking for was on “this PC” and not on the other one in the upstairs bedroom that is turned off? Haven’t you copied documents between PCs and edited them and lost track of which is the latest copy? Aren’t some of the disks running close to full making you wonder if you need to get a new PC and move all your data there? What if one of your computers’ harddisk crashed and you lost all the data? That has probably happened to you at some point, or at least you have worried about it.

But I back up my data!

There are several ways in which you could be dealing with this. You could put all your PCs on the home network and regularly backup data between them. You could save your data on CDs or DVDs regularly. You could use software that backs up your data onto external hard disks automatically. Depending on how many conputers you have and how much data you need to manage, some of these ways work for you. Are you backing up frequently enough? How hard is it to do a backup? Are there better ways?

[Continued in Strategies For Backing Up Your Computer Data.]