4 Easy Ways to Keep Your Data at Your Fingertips

Now it’s more convenient than ever to get your most important files whenever you need them

You know it’s important to be able to access your data whenever and wherever you need it—but chances are, you’ve been in one of those frustrating situations when you get to your meeting or class and the file you need just isn’t there.

Maybe you forgot it on your computer at home. Maybe your computer crashed right before the big sales presentation. Or maybe late one night, after slaving away on your project report, you accidentally hit the “Delete” button and whisked away hours of work.

If this sounds familiar to you, don’t worry: to follow are some steps you can take to make sure you can keep your data ready and at your fingertips wherever you are—no matter what the circumstances!

Scenario #1: Accidentally Deleting Data

If you’ve ever accidentally deleted an important email or document in the middle of a massive organizing spree (or just by sheer accident), you certainly know that instant pang of panic or regret.

Fortunately for you, the data that’s been “deleted” isn’t really gone, even if you’ve emptied the Windows recycle bin: Search and Recover uses industry-leading data recovery technology to quickly and easily salvage important program files from your PC, digital camera, flash drive, smartphone, or any other digital media device. Search and Recover is your first line of defense against data disaster, so you’ll always have a way to recover your most important documents, pictures, and emails.

Scenario #2: Running Out Of Space On Your PC

If all of your favorite music, pictures, and videos are taking up too much space on your PC’s hard drive, it might be a good idea to transfer some of those files to an external hard drive. These days, the storage available on most external hard drives can run into the terabytes—in other words, there’s enough space in there to keep the entire contents of two or even three computers’ worth of data.

External hard drives are good for keeping large music, movie, and photo collections together, since you can archive many PCs’ worth of data onto a single drive. You can also perform “incremental updates” to individual files without completely copying all the data again. They can also be moved offsite to protect your data from other kinds of emergencies, like a break-in or fire.

However, as physical media, external hard drives are subject to the same kinds of catastrophes that your computer’s internal hard drive is. You can lose the data on your external hard drive if it gets dropped, scratched, soaked, and so on. If you’ve moved your external drive offsite, then keeping your backup up-to-date can be inconvenient. In other words, while storing data on an external hard drive is a good basic backup strategy, the options have evolved to include drive imaging and secure online storage “in the cloud,” so it might be best to consider these as part of your overall storage strategy.

Scenario #3: Your PC Crashes

It’s your worst nightmare: you have to give a big presentation tomorrow morning, when—oh no!—you’re confronted with the blue screen of death. You don’t have time to go looking around for the files and programs that you might have stored on your external drive: you need to get your PC up and running again right now.

In this kind of scenario, it’s useful to have a disk image on hand. A disk image works like a “snapshot” of your hard drive that can be recorded onto an external disk (like a DVD). They’re particularly useful to have around for disaster recovery (if your hard drive crashes), since you can use the image copy to instantly restore your data and system configuration to the state it was in when it was originally created. Disk images are handy to have around, and make rebooting and restoring all of your information to a crashed PC less painful. They’re a definite lifesaver if anything should happen to your hard drive and you need to get up and running again.

To create a disk image, all you need are a few disks (or an extra hard drive) and drive imaging software that will create this “snapshot” for you. However, while disk imaging is a great way to restore data to a crashed PC, it can be difficult to use a disk image to transfer data and information from one PC to another, due to the unique hardware on each computer and the proprietary nature of most software programs. In other words, if you have a disk image of an old PC that crashed, it can be hard to transfer the data from that image onto the brand-new PC you bought to replace it.

Scenario #4: You Forgot Your Data At Home

It’s frustrating to get to work and realize that you left your flash drive—where you saved a copy of the project you’d been working on all weekend—at home.

Using an online backup service is a great strategy to make sure that your important data remains available to you wherever you are. It provides the convenience of letting you securely access those files from anywhere in the world—and what’s more, even if you managed to crash your computer, drop your external hard drive out of a window, and lose all of your disk images, you would still be able to access and recover your most important files. All you’ll need is a working internet connection to access your data.

Storing data online is one of the most convenient methods to keep your data automatically backed up without any effort (which means it will happen consistently). This ensures that your most up-to-date information will be accessible, even if you lose your hardware. Unlike physical backup media like disk images and external hard drives, this data cannot be destroyed or misplaced.