Sandy uses a portable hard drive to backup her photos. Leo says that's a good idea, but it's not enough. Leo says that adopting a 3-2-1 backup strategy is best - three copies, two formats, one off site. Check out The DAM Book by Peter Krogh and DPBestFlow.Org.
David's computer runs Windows 7 Home Premium. Lately, he's getting a lot of failure messages. He ran MalwareBytes and has stopped malware that was running. Leo says that Malware Bytes may have taken out system files that the malware has attached it to. Leo suggests using the recovery discs that David can burn from his computer and then just start over. Back up the data, then restore from those recovery discs. That will format the drive and re-install Windows.
When Jeff tried to turn on his computer, it didn't do anything. No fans, no beeps, it was silent. He unplugged the computer, plugged it back in, and then it started up just fine. Since Jeff's computer is 6 years old, Leo says it may just be that the power switch is failing after years of use. It also could be a flakey power supply, or possibly something more serious such as a bad motherboard. Leo doesn't suspect the hard drive is at fault here.
Ronald needs to back up his data, and is in the market for an external hard drive. First of all, Leo says he should look for a USB 3.0 drive instead of USB 2.0 because it's much faster.
Paul is looking for software to allow him to backup each version of what he's working on. Leo says that's called "versioning." Windows 7 has versioning, called "Shadow Copy." He can enable it in his settings, inside System Properties Control Panel. He should look for a System Protection Tab, and enable Shadow Copy. It'll copy to a portion to the local hard drive that he can then backup.
There are several third party programs that can also accomplish this:
This is $55, but has a free trial.
John is a photographer for a local high school and he shoots images. He needs to organize both stills and videos and get them up to the cloud. Leo says that putting video up to the cloud just isn't practical. He'd need what Leo calls "more bandwidth than God" to upload video. Upload speeds are just too slow. According to Wolfram Alpha, at 50mbps (which is high), it would take almost two days to upload 1TB of data if nothing else was being done. Slower connections could take up to 61 days for 1TB! Rely on backup hard drives that he can take off site. It's far cheaper as well.
Melissa's son is trying to upload videos with her iMac, but she's having issues now with drive space. She has a 1TB hard drive backup and the iMac says there's too many items in the "startup disc." Leo says that's the internal drive, and it's full. Leo says Junior is not taking the videos off after uploading them. There are programs that would let her look at the drive graphically to see what can be removed. Anything over a 1GB in size should be moved over to the external drive and removed.
Paul has taken on the task of repairing his sister's computer, which has had registry errors. He tried reinstalling Windows, but may have messed it up.
Leo suggests backing up the data, wiping the entire drive and then reinstalling Windows. He should watch carefully during the install process, and at one point he'll have a chance to re-partition the drive. He'll want to delete all existing partitions so there's one C drive. Format it NTFS and install Windows on it.
Leo says he doesn't think so. It largely depends on the software, but most restore utilities will read the hard drive he's restoring to and avoid duplicates. It largely depends on the utility that was used.
Carbonite will back up all of his data, but Leo recommends encrypting those files before it backs up so they're protected.
