There is a sickly feeling that comes over you when you go to open an

important file and the computer says “File Not Found”. “It was just there yesterday!” You yell frantically at the machine but that cold metal box has no empathy for your loss. “Ah ha!” you think, as you reach for your flash drive that has a copy of that precious file. Let’s go through the steps to have this copy and never experience that sickly sinking feeling again.

The only safe way to keep copies of your data is to make multiple copies across multiple devices. You want to have your most important files in at least two different spots, maybe one on your computer and another on a flash drive or even another computer. If you make multiple copies and just keep them on the same device then you aren’t really covered if there is a hardware failure.

For this example, let’s say we need to back up our Word document file called “Ancestry.docx”. There is a myriad of ways to go about this but here are two of the simplest ways.  The first step is just making regular manual copies of the file to another device. Now for a second device to store the document you can use a flash drive, external hard drive, or even another computer. In my humble opinion, the easiest way to back up a document would to just be to email it to myself after every time I update it. This keeps it on the server that hosts my email and therefore I can get it on any computer, at any time and access that email. Our second manual option for one of the external media devices is to plug that device in to your computer. Once there you should get a pop-up message asking if you want to view the files on that media device.  Select yes. You can then see everything on that device and you can right-click on “Ancestry.docx” in your Documents folder and select “Copy”. Now go back to that external media device and right-click anywhere inside of that folder and select “paste”. Voila! Backup completed and Ancestry.docx is saved again!  Confused about right-click, flash drives or copy-paste?  Keep reading…

We have a second option to back up our important file, but this time we can set it to go automatically! We can use a backup program to automatically backup our files to external media whenever we want to schedule it! This process is a little more complicated and if it is something of interest and importance, then give us a call at Eagle Technology Solutions. Any of our qualified technicians can help you out!
Call or email at 785.628.1330 [email protected]