Theft Leads to Loss of Precious Family Photos

It's a story that unfortunately is all too familiar. A family's home gets broken into and high value electrical goods are targeted including the family's PC.

The family is left devastated and traumatised and whilst time will, to some degree, heal the pain and hopefully the insurance company will pay for replacement goods nothing will replace the lost memories now stored on many families PC's.

Of course, today, computers in the home are not just there to provide access to the Internet or to play a few games on. With the huge switch to digital cameras the PC is now being used as a "family photo album" to store all snapshots of children growing up, special family events, holidays and everything else that was originally stored in the classic Family Photo Album.

And its not just photographs but increasingly as people become more comfortable with the technology family videos are also being copied to and stored on the family PC.

Given the relative "value" of these images and memories, many of which simply cannot be replaced, it's critical that we all get into the routine of backing up the data from our PC.

Creating a back-up system does not need to cost the earth and for many the chances are there is already an old unused and unloved PC in the home that's no longer used because its too slow, won't play the latest games, or runs an old Operating System. Inside these abandoned PC's will be a Hard Disk Drive that can be salvaged and reused to create your own personal back up system - think of it as you back up "safe" in which you store all your treasured memories and documents.

All that's needed is to take the salvaged hard drive and pop it into an appropriate Hard Drive Enclosure. A Hard Drive enclosure also referred to as a "Caddy" or "Case" provides a housing for the Hard Drive and allows it to connect to any PC via a USB lead. Once connected the old hard drive (but now in the new enclosure) will appear as a new Drive letter on PC it's connected to and from there you can copy all your important documents to it. When you've done this simply disconnect it and store it somewhere away from your main PC so if your PC does get stolen its not attached to it!

If you don't have an old an old hard drive you can salvage then you could buy a new Hard Disk Drive to use with the enclosure - its still a really costs effective way to build a back-up solutions.