Comments for If all I do is web browsing, email and video, do I still need to back up?

Comment from Charles Tilley on 2009-11-19

2009-11-20T03:18:51Z

How is it that you can lose your emails if your system crashes and you have no backup? I've had two laptops crash on me and all I did was pick another one up and sign on and get my emails. I've gotten a lot of good advice here (a couple that saved my butt), but this one, I don't understand. How my system going down causes Yahoo!, Hotmail, Gmail and Operamail to lose my emails. However, you should backup, regardless of the email situation. It's the only way to save your valuable (and sometimes unreplaceable) photos and work. But if you are one of those who simply either has nothing of importance, and only has the basics on your system to operate, as long as you have a working restore disc, then you don't have to backup. But bear in mind that reinstall after reinstall shortens the life of your hard drive.

Of course crashing the machine won't cause your web based email to be lost. The article specifically addresses that "if its on your PC you need to back it up".

And to clarify one point: repeated (re)installs will not wear out your hard drive any more than normal usage. A reinstall just reads and writes data to the hard disk, which is all your hard disk does as you use it every day.

20-Nov-2009

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A comment on: If all I do is web browsing, email and video, do I still need to back up?

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Comment from Umair on 2009-11-12

2009-11-12T16:06:04Z

Backing up my emails helped me recover my hacked gmail in some 15 minutes. The password recovery form asks many questions and I could answer every single one with dates because I still had access to my emails on Outlook and Thunderbird.

Even what seem like data you wouldn't mind losing could become useful. I lost my backup data on an encrypted partition due to first sector corruption, I was able to recover 90% updated data from another backup that I had not deleted

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A comment on: If all I do is web browsing, email and video, do I still need to back up?

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Comment from Minot Isok on 2009-11-11

2009-11-12T01:33:41Z

It is not always what I'm currently using or doing with my computer that makes me decide on backups. It is all the tweaking of a system after an operating system install/reinstall that requires a lot of time... and you never remember every little tweak unless you have a backup.

A backup just saves me from all that tweaking I would have to do.

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A comment on: If all I do is web browsing, email and video, do I still need to back up?

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Comment from Mark Jacobs on 2009-11-11

2009-11-11T21:19:06Z

If it turns out that all you need to back up are your emails, a simple option is to open a gmail or yahoo account strictly for back-up and forward all of your inportant emails as they come. You can even have gmail do that for you with out even forwarding by having gmail download it automatically.
In fact, you can email anything you want to back-up to a gmail account. They hold over 7GB.
You might want to consider encrypting any private files first. You can use truecrypt, pgp, gpg, winrar etc. for that.
Just log on to that account at least once a month (I thinkd the rule is every 3 months but monthly is safer) so that it won't be closed on you.

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A comment on: If all I do is web browsing, email and video, do I still need to back up?

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