The most common way is to back up your data to an external hard drive or USB Flash drive. The most important  thing is, to create backups of your data.  The cost for backup solutions (software and hardware) is less, than what you would have to pay for professional data recovery.
Additional options in these days are the so called “Cloud Back-ups”. A software installed on your computer creates a copy of your files in the “cloud”. This simply means, your files are copied to a storage drive on the internet. There are multiple providers that offer these services. They usually give you a limited amount of space for free. Once you reach this limited you have to pay for additional storage space.
Also we have “NAS” (network attached storage) drives, which allow us to integrate storage devices into a network without having Server based Network. Multiple user can share and access data over a network, some of them even give you the option to create your own personal cloud, so that you access your information from different locations.
We have developed solutions for end users as well as for business clients to securely protect their data. Preventing data loss saves time and money. Contact us for a consultation and show you what we can do for you.
Answer yourself these questions when a hard drive crashes or your computer won’t start anymore:
- What is my data worth?
- Can I recover lost files?
- How much time am I loosing on projects?
- How much money am I loosing?
- Can I still meet the deadline on projects?
- What is my time worth, trying to retrieve data and reinstall software?
These are just some points you should consider, why data backups are so important.
A Backup operation creates an image file for backup and disaster recovery purposes, while the Disk Cloning simply copies/moves the entire contents of one hard disk drive to another. Here's how both tools work and when you should use them.
When you create a backup, you get a compressed file containing an exact copy of your hard disk, a disk partition or individual files or folders (you make this choice when you create an image archive).If you create a backup of disk or partition, this backup contains everything that resides on the selected disk/partition, including operating system, applications and all files and folders. You can save this image to any supported storage device and use it as a backup or for disaster recovery purposes.
When you use the Disk Cloning , you copy all contents of one hard disk drive onto another hard disk drive: as a result, both the source and the target disk have the same data. This function allows you to transfer all the information (including the operating system and installed programs) from a small hard disk drive to a large one without having to reinstall and reconfigure all of your software. Disk Clone operation it is not generally used as a backup strategy, as it offers little flexibility.
In general, disk clone is a one time operation designed to clone one disk to a different one for the purpose of migrating to a larger hard drive or to a new machine.
A backup operation offers greater flexibility as a backup strategy:
• Backup can be scheduled (e.g. regular automatic backups that require no user interaction);
• Backup changes can be appended incrementally or differentially (i.e. after a full backup, subsequent backups will take less time and occupy less space than the first one);
• Backups allow you to keep several versions of the backed up data and you can restore to one of the previous versions (e.g. you can keep backups from one, two and three weeks ago on the same disk and you can recover the backup from the moment that you need);
• Backup can be mounted and searched through (e.g. if you want to quickly find, view and copy a file from it).
Either way (backup and recovery of the entire disk or disk clone) you can transfer the whole operating system and installed programs to a new disk.