In this article, we will explain why you should be making backups of your data, point out how much important data you have on your PC and then proceed to show you why you should use PicoBackup.

Reasons to Backup
Below, we elaborate on the reasons why backups are absolutely essential.

Viruses
New computer viruses seem to popup almost every day and the Internet makes it extremely easy for viruses to spread worldwide in a matter of hours. Even if you have antivirus software installed, it does not guarantee that you are protected.

Antivirus software can only protect your computer if the antivirus software vendor can create an update for it and you actually download that update and apply it to your antivirus software before the virus reaches your computer. Now ask yourself, when was the last time you updated your antivirus software ?

Hardware Failure
Computers break down more often than you think, especially the mechanical parts where there is constant wear, like your hard disk, CPU fan, power supply fan, etc.

Hard disks do not last forever. If your hard disk fails, there is a good chance you will lose all your data, unless you send your hard disk to a professional data recovery company that charges hundreds of dollars an hour, and even then, there is no guarantee you will ever get back all your data.

It is true that hard disk manufacturers specify a "Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF)" figure for their hard disks that could be over a hundred thousand hours, but you should realise that this figure is an average of many hard disks in a controlled test environment. Some hard disks lasts much longer than the MTBF, while others fail long before the MTBF figure is reached. On top of that, there are also possibilities of manufacturing defects and mishandling by the user.

Another common point of failure in computers are cooling fans. When they fail, your PC will get hotter inside and that could lead to many weird behaviours like programs crashing from time to time, PC rebooting for no reason, etc. All these behaviour could potentially corrupt data on your hard drive.

Software Disasters
Software bugs or glitches are now a way of life. Notice how many fixes or updates Microsoft release for Windows every month ? The fact is, software is a complex piece of engineering created by human beings, and given that humans are not perfect, neither is software.

Whenever you install new software, upgrade existing software or even apply updates, you are taking a risk. If you are unlucky, the software glitch could crash your computer and potentially lead to data loss. If you are really unlucky, it could render your Windows completely unusable and you would have to reinstall everything from scratch.

Human Error
Most computer users would have probably accidentally deleted something important at some point in time. People make mistakes and many mistakes that you do on a computer could potentially lead to data loss. Examples include misunderstanding how a feature work or misconfiguring some software. On the hardware side, there is always the possibility of someone accidentally switching off the mains, tripping over the power cable, spilling coffee, etc., or if you are using a notebook, there is always the risk that you might accidentally drop it.

Hackers
Hackers have many means of breaking into your computer. You may have heard of trojans, a kind of backdoor software that comes into your computer disguised as some other legitimate software. Some trojans come in the form of a virus. The trojan creates a backdoor on your computer and gives the hacker full access to your computer. There is no telling what the hacker will do on your computer, but they certainly could delete all your data.

Other Reasons
Computer theft is quite common, especially if you are using a notebook computer. There is also other things to worry about, like flood, fire and other forms of natural disasters.

How Much Important Data Do You Have ?
What we have shown above are just the common causes of data loss. Here is a simple exercise that you can easily carry out to see just how much important data you have on your computer. The following are places on a typical computer where important data usually resides.

• Your "My Documents" folder
• Your email program
• Your Internet Explorer "Favorites" or Firefox/Mozilla/Netscape Bookmarks
• Any other folder where you save the files you create

Look through the above locations and ask yourself the following questions:

Why Use PicoBackup Instead of Backing Up Manually ?
You should ask yourself how often you backup your data now. If you do not mind the hassle, you are disciplined and you have a routine in place to carry out manual backups regularly, then you will do just fine as you are now.

The majority of computer users however, just assume that nothing bad will ever happen to their computer because it is a lot of work to make backups.

Consider the steps to perform a *manual* backup:

Looking at the above, you can see that there are quite a lot of work involved in performing a backup and it can be very time consuming. Also, you have to repeat the above steps for all the different things that you want to backup and you would have to do that regularly.

If you use PicoBackup, your work is greatly simplified because PicoBackup comes built in with scheduling, compression, encryption, FTP, CD/DVD burning and more. Also, specialised plugins like the Outlook plugin and Mozilla Bookmarks plugin automatically helps you locate the relevant files that needs to be backup.

Why Partial Backups Instead of Full Drive Image Backups ?
PicoBackup was designed mainly to do backups of only the important data. While you could use PicoBackup to do a backup of your entire hard disk, that is not the optimum way to use PicoBackup.

Why backup full hard drive images ?
1. You can restore your whole computer back to the same state as at the time you performed the backup.

Why NOT backup full hard drive images ?
1. Requires a Lot of Time
It takes a very long time to perform a backup, so you will likely do it less frequently. On the other hand, the data on your computer is changing every day as you use your computer. You will be sending/receiving new emails, adding new contacts, creating new schedules in the calendar, creating new documents, installing new programs, installing new updates and so on. So, in a short period of time, your backup would have become obsolete.

We should point out that being able to restore data that is up-to-date is much more important than being able to restore your computer back to its original state but contains out-of-date data. The operating system and the software you use can always be reinstalled from installation discs, but if you lose the data, there is no way to get it back unless you have a backup.

2. Requires a Lot of Storage Space
Backing up a full hard drive image takes up a lot of hard disk space or many CD/DVD discs. This means it may not be practical to carry out backups frequently or to keep multiple versions of a backup.

3. Requires a Lot of Bandwidth
If you want to be safe and keep your backups off-site, uploading the huge backup to remote server via Internet is not very practical, even if you are using a broadband connection.

Why partial backups with PicoBackup ?
1. Requires a Lot *LESS* Time
Since you are only making backups of the important data, backups will be very fast. This makes it practical to automate a backup task and have it run daily or even several times a day. PicoBackup's flexible scheduler makes this very simple.

2. Requires a Lot *LESS* Storage Space
Backing up only the data will use a lot less storage space, making it practical to backup the data to a variety of storage devices like floppy drive, Iomega Zip drive, thumb/flash drive, etc. that you would not have considered for full hard drive image backups. Also, since less space is required, you can configure PicoBackup to perform multi-generational backup where multiple versions of the backup is kept, allowing you to fall back to the required state of the data you backup.

3. Requires a Lot *LESS* Bandwidth
Since the backup is much smaller in size, you can easily upload the backup to a remote server. PicoBackup comes with built-in FTP support.

4. Easier Access to Files in Backup
If you need to retrieve a single file from the backup file, a smaller size backup means you can get to it faster, since there will be a lot less things to search through. PicoBackup allows you to easily view, restore or extract files from the backup file.

Conclusion
One should remember Murphy's Law. Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong, and more often than not, it will go wrong at the worst possible time. Having a proper backup procedure in place ensures that you are always prepared when something does go wrong. If you have not been making regular backups, there is no better time to start. You can download a fully functional evaluation copy of PicoBackup now and start protecting your data today.