In your household and business, Santa has probably been busy delivering a new phone, tablet computer, PC or laptop. Fantastic new additions to the family or business tech, but are they correctly and fully setup?
Most new computers have antivirus software pre-installed, but usually this is on a one to three month trial only. Make sure when this expires that you purchase a 12 month licence to keep the computer virus free.
When new devices are setup, the last thing on people’s minds are catastrophes like hard disk failure, since the device is so new. Backups are often forgotten about at the beginning, and may never get configured. Don’t leave it until it’s too late.
Make sure you setup a backup system of some kind. Ideas include a home network area storage (NAS) drive. This is effectively a hard drive on your home network. Use it to replicate data on other computers. Don’t use it as the only place to store data, use it as a copy of all the data on the networked computers and laptops.
For tablet computers and mobile phones, consider Apple’s iCloud service. It costs less than ten pounds per annum for several gigabytes of storage space. This is also really useful if you upgrade your phone. You can backup your old phone, buy a new one, and then setup the new phone from a backup of the old phone. All your apps, data and settings will be restored really quickly and easily.
For PCs, laptops and Macs there is cost effective cloud based backup such as that provided by Carbonite. A 12 month subscription licence is around £50. The amount of data you can backup is unlimited. As you create and edit files on your PC, laptop or mac, the Carbonite app automatically trickles updates to the cloud servers. Your data is being continually backed up. How clever is that!?