When a hard drive fails or is attacked by a virus, it's important to be prepared. Read on to learn how external drives and backup software can help keep your data safe. When using a PC at home and especially if you run a home office, data backup is one of the most important jobs you have. Even if it's just emails, your customer lists and a few Word documents, imagine trying to run your business without them? Not making a backup of your work data is simply asking for trouble. The sad truth is that most people never consider data backup as a critical task until something bad happens. Define bad? When you least expect it, your hard drive starts to make clunking noises and fails, which results in six months worth of work gone in less time than it takes to send a text message! Don't let this happen to you.

Losing data doesn’t always mean a hard drive crash. Sometimes it just means we deleted a folder (with our kid’s photos or our music library.) “Oops” is the #2 most common cause of data loss (after hardware failure) according to data recovery specialist, Ontrack. Is the delete key too big on the keyboard? Blame it on that… but all of us have done it and wished there were an undo key that was just as big.

So what backup options do you have and which one is best? This will depend on a couple of factors.

1. How much data do you need to backup?
2. What is your data storage budget?
3. What backup software will you use?

There's such a wide variety of backup methods out there that it can get confusing at times - especially if you're new to the whole IT aspect of setting up a home office.

If you're looking for a highly portable backup solution, then a USB memory stick is ideal. These devices offer storage of up to 64GB and provide a secure, portable method of storage. I currently own an 8GB USB memory stick which is perfect for quick backup jobs and dragging small software packages and technical spreadsheets around with me.

At the time of this Rapidfire Bullets Newsletter, a 4GB Kingston, Corsair (or premium quality) USB memory stick can be purchased for under $25 at any decent computer store.

If you need more storage space for the data intensive home office, then something like an external USB hard drive is perfect. These drives offer storage capacities of up to 1TB (terabyte) which is 1,000GB of storage!

Again, at the time of this Rapidfire Bullets Newsletter, a  3.5” 1TB Seagate external USB hard drive can be purchased for around $140. The smaller 2.5” drives powered by a single USB cable with a 500GB capacity can be had for around the same price.

So what kind of backup software do you need? While Windows has its own basic backup software included, you should consider using a trusted software package like Acronis True Image. This package has a bigger feature set than the built-in Windows Backup and gives you more flexibility to backup and restore your entire PC, or just selected files and applications. It also allows incremental backups which saves time and disk space, and the option to schedule regular backups to run automatically in the background, without disturbing your daily work routine.

If you work for a big company and data goes missing or gets corrupt, you can leave it to the friendly staff at Rapidfire who can restore the data from a server while you make yourself a coffee; but at home with your own PC and work data, it’s up to you to backup your important files... before you lose them!