Backing Up

Our experience has shown that backing up to CD or DVD is inconvenient as well as slow and often unreliable - we have seen writable CDs fade and become unreadable in as little as a year. USB memory sticks are used by some people but they have limited capacity and also have limits to the number of times they can be written before they become corrupt or stop working. The best solution we have found for speed and reliability and low cost is to use one or more USB-attached hard drives. We can create a simple backup system where you simply plug in the hard drive and double-click an icon to run the backup. On completion you can remove the drive and put it somewhere safe until you are ready to make another backup. It couldn't be easier!

We can also arrange for you to have multiple copies of your files backed up. This will allow you to recover a previous version of a document if you need to.

There are some hard drives that come with their own backup software. However, these usually use their own proprietory file format, which means you are dependent on the manufacturer's software to recover your valuable files. There is no way to be sure that this will be possible on the computer you will have in 10 years time. The way we do it, your files are stored as files, so no special software is needed to recover them. Let us tell you how.