The hard drive of your computer can fail (crash). When this happens you will lose your documents, photo’s and everything else that you have stored there. Sometimes an expert can recover them for you, but not always. It is more reliable to backup all your files onto portable storage devices and keep them in several places to ensure their protection.
Online storage
There is a possibility to store your photos online for free on websites like Picasa Web Album, Photobucket and MySpace. On Picasa Web Album for example you can store up to 4000 photos
You can upload files to your email like Gmail and Yahoo
Offline storage
External hard Drives
An external hard drive is actually simular to the computer hard drive. You can connect it to your computer and backup large amounts of data.
Discs
If your computer has a CD reader/ writer or DVD reader/writer you can backup your files on disc
There are two main categories of writeable discs you can buy:
Recordable discs such as CD-R or DVD-R are discs that can only be written once.
Re-Writeable discs such as CD-RW or DVD-RW can be written over many times.
Pen drives/ Flash drives
A Pen drive or Flash drive is a very compact storage device, which you can hang on to your key ring.
It is ideal to store your most important files on. You just insert the stick into the USB port. Right click the file you wish to backup. Select “Sent to” in the menu and click (F) removable disk
Hardcopy
Print out your most important documents and file them somewhere.
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