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Backing up your PC and smartphone! A chore most people abhor but which is quite necessary to avoid losing all of your Data. Or, if you’ve decided to defect from the “in Crowd” of Blackberry users to the “smart crowd” of smartphone users as described in How to transfer Phone Contacts and Data from your Blackberry to your Apple iPhone or Google Android smartphone or Tablet.

So what the best software out there to protect and preserve the Data from your “precious” in case the inevitable and unthinkable happens? First off the bat, if you’ve already read my article above, you’d realize there are indeed two (2) Backup methods:

  1. Physical Backup

  2. Cloud Backup

The distinction lies in the location of your backup file, which is usually a Zipped Archive in either *.zip, *.rar or *.tar version. Physical backups are usually kept in a storage Device such as an External Hard-drive or on a form of Storage Media that’s guaranteed to last a long time (10 years at least!) and has sufficient storage space, such as DVD or Blu-Ray.

Hint: Hard-Drives, especially SSD (Solid State Drives) are always best as explained in Seagate – Samsung Swap Hard-Drive Assets – Profitable Cloudy Horizon

Cloud Backup is done via the Internet and is stored on either a paid Local Cloud Server or a foreign Cloud Server such as Digicel’s Cloud backup services as described in Digicel’s Cloud Backup Services – A deep Analysis or on your own local cloud, such as either the free 2G Dropbox or 15GB Google Drive as describe in Google Drive, the Dropbox clone, now ups the ante to 15GB of Free Storage during Google I/O.

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dropbox-logo

For you, the smartphone user, How to transfer Phone Contacts and Data from your Blackberry to your Apple iPhone or Google Android smartphone or Tablet provides sufficient advice to make backup a painless experience. But if you are a person with a computer and you just want to make a quick Physical or Cloud Backup on the cheap, here what you’ll need for this DIY (Do it Yourself) Sunday Morning Task:

  • External Hard-Drive (available for purchase on Amazon). Anything above 500GB will do

  • Fairly Fast Laptop or Computer

  • Free Backup software

Provided you have less than 500GB of Data, this should be fairly painless procedure. The lists of Backup software are as follows:

Web Utility Software

Installed software

Built in Operating System Utilities

  • Mac OS X Time Machine (Apple Mac OS X)

  • Windows Backup and Restore (Windows)

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Use of these software is very self explanatory. But if you’re like me and can’t be bothered with complicated software, all you really need is:

Steps for my method and the above listed software are the same:

  1. Install the Auslogic Disk Defrag

  2. Defrag the Drive you want to backup using Auslogic Disk Defrag. Makes the files more organized and speeds up the backup process

  3. Use the software Utility (7-Zip Zipping software in my case) and create the Zipped Archive.

  4. Draw upon the power of Job and be patient. Some light reading would do you some good at this point

  5. When finally finished after a few minutes (or hours), copy the Zipped Archive to the External Hard-Drive

  6. If the size is less than 2GB, copy to Dropbox. Otherwise if it’s greater than 2GB but less than 15Gb then copy it to Google Drive

That’s it. Full Backup Sunday will never be the same as you Back-it-Up like a Dumpa Truck. Stay sane and backup once Every Day and twice on Weekends and you’ll sleep easier and recover faster.

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