Millions of treasured family photographs and important emails are stored on the hard drives of our personal computers. It is easy to take for granted that these special documents are stored safely on our computers, but this is not always the case. Computers can become corrupted by a hardware failure or software problem, trapping our documents and making them unavailable to us.
Losing precious, one-of-a-kind files and photographs can be devastating, but fortunately there are steps that anyone can take to protect and back up their data and make sure that their files are safe for them to enjoy later. Here are three simple things you can do to protect your family photographs, emails and other important documents.
Add an Extra Hard Drive to Your Personal Computer
Hard drives can sometimes suddenly become unusable. Each computer hard drive is made of hundreds of small components, and it only takes one of these to fail in order to render the hard drive inoperable and trap your data onto the corrupted drive.
Adding an extra hard drive is easy to do, and they are very inexpensive to buy. This way you can back up your most precious files to a second hard drive and have access to your files if the worst happens. When data is trapped on an unresponsive hard drive, all is not lost. There are services like Secure Data Recovery that can save your data from a broken hard drive and save your family photographs from being lost forever.
Regularly Back Up Your Files to a Cloud Service
There are a number of services available, many of them free to use, that will periodically back up your personal files to an online data storage system known as a ‘cloud’.
This keeps your data securely saved on a third-party hard drive that you can access from any web browser. This not only gives you peace of mind knowing that a copy of your photographs and files are safely stored online, but they are also accessible from any computer or smartphone in the world; making it easy to access the files whenever you like from wherever you are.
Make Hard Copies That You Can Keep Safe Yourself
One of the best and simplest measures you can take is to make copies of your data that you can keep in your home.
You can regularly copy your data to CD-ROMs or USB thumb drives that you can store at home so, you always have your data securely stored and available. You can also print emails and photographs at home to give you a hard copy of files that you can enjoy at any time.
We can have a lot of important and treasured memories stored on our computers, and it is easy to take them for granted and assume they will always be there for us to access. But when a hard drive fails or becomes corrupted, this can be devastating as we can lose photographs of important events or of family members that we have lost since the photos were taken. Everyone should take some steps to protect their most important files by backing them up online and making hard copies.