BACKUPS

Just another update email for a few reasons, as always I want to remind people to ensure you've got a backup of your important data. Even if that is simply copying your most important docs, pictures to a USB memory stick or external hard drive, as long as your valuable data is in at least 2 places you've got some level of backup in place. 

If you've got some software doing the backup for you make sure you know what it's doing and that it is definitely still doing it properly. A program that was setup a year ago may have hit a glitch and could be unable to resume the backup. Hardware devices can fail causing the backup to fail. I recently had a client with intermittent backup problems with what appeared to be a hard drive failure but only after setting up a new drive it was discovered that the USB port (or something else) was actually at fault, not the hard drive at all. So be careful people!

A handy feature that a backup should do for you is keep old copies of your backed up files, so even if a file (like a Word doc) has edits done to it or some part deleted and then saved, you can actually go back to the way the file was previously. Windows does offer a built in method of doing this type of thing but nothing is as thorough as having your data on an external source kept in another room away from the main computer.

If your backup drive is kept plugged in all the time it's susceptible to viruses. So don't have your backup drive permanently plugged in.

Network drives are susceptible to viruses too so keep that in mind.