Protecting Your Digital Photos and Documents

 We all have a ton of data on our devices; important documents, photos of friends and family, stuff you just don't want to lose. Anything can happen though, disaster is always lurking right around the corner. Spill your coffee on your laptop, drop your phone into the pool, your devices can even just up and stop working, and poof, everything is gone in a flash. That's why you need to back up those important files, and you need to do it now. Do not wait until it's too late.

There's lots of ways you can do it, and they're all relatively easy. You can back your files up to the cloud, you can use a backup program that will copy your files to an external hard drive and then do incremental updates to the saved data every time you make a change on your device, or you can just copy and paste the files you want to protect to an external drive. You have lots of options, and they all have their strengths and weaknesses. Let's review a few.

Cloud backups can be seamless and easy, but the cloud can get hacked, so I'm not a big fan. I don't want any more of my data floating around in the ether for some bad guy to poach and resell on the dark web, there's enough of it out there already. I'm always getting a notice from some institution or other saying, "We regret to inform you that all of your personal information has been compromised. Not to worry though, we've signed you up for 3 free months of Experian Credit Monitoring Services and DeathGrip ID Theft Protection coverage. Enjoy it on us! (special terms and conditions apply)."

No thanks, I'm good. The best and most reliable way to safeguard your data is to back it up to an external hard drive. I don't like to use automatic backup software to do it though. It's always running in the background, and it slows the crap out of your devices. Plus, it backs up stuff that you really don't need to back up. The file structure it creates on your external drive isn't very intuitive, either. I 'm going to show you a relatively easy way to back up your files, and I guarantee it will take a little bit of the worry out of your life.

My preferred back up method is to copy and paste my primary file folders over to an external drive and then update it on a regular basis. It's quick, easy and painless, and the file structure is simple, it's just a straight up copy of your hard drive. The folders you want to back up (or copy) on a PC are shown below. Note: If you save a lot of stuff to your desktop, you should copy that folder over as well. 

These 5 (or 6) folders hold all of your personal data, and that's all you want to be backing up and storing, cuz that's what's really important here, protecting your stuff, not Microsoft's.

For a reliable external drive, I like to use a simple USB plug and play drive like the Seagate 2TB Backup Plus Slim Hard Drive. It's small in size but big on storage, and there's no power cords to fuss with. It works off of a built in USB 3.0 cable, drawing its power from whatever device its plugged into. It comes with preloaded backup software, but I don't use it. As I mentioned earlier, backup programs always seem to be running when you don't want them to, dragging your device down. I just plug in the USB drive to my device, open it up, ignore the preloaded software and create a couple of folders.

In this example, I've created a desktop backup folder and a laptop backup folder. Inside of each of those folders I create dated sub folders, e.g. "Laptop Backup 07 01 2025". There's plenty of room on these drives to do multiple backups of each device, and you should. Next, I copy and paste my main folders from the device's hard drive to the external drive's new dated folders. Simple as that. You can copy and paste one folder at a time, or do them all at once, your choice.

Once the external hard drive starts to get full, I delete the oldest dated subfolder before I create another one, this way I always have multiple copies of all my files on the external device, and I never run out of disk space on it.

But what about the pics on my phone, you say? The best option is to sync your phone, tablets and any thumb drives or SD cards you have with your PC or Mac on a regular basis. Then when you back up your PC to your external drive you catch everything in one neat package. It's the same principle as above, you don't need any fancy software or devices, just plug your mobile device into your PC or Mac with a USB cable and copy and paste (or drag and drop) the pictures and files over to the computer. Easy peasy. Synching your mobile devices also allows you to safely remove pics and free up storage space on them, something we all need to do.

Bonus Tip: For added peace of mind, I store my external hard drives in our little grab and go SentrySafe burn box. If disaster strikes, all of our docs and pics go with us, even if our devices don't make the cut.

Bottom line, you don't have to do it my way, but you do have to do it. Choose whatever method you're most comfortable with and do it without delay. Do not be that person that calls me on a Monday night in a panic and says "Help, that new upgrade just bricked my device and now I've lost all of my family pictures." All I'm going to do is give you the number for the Geek Squad, and wish you Godspeed and good luck, because you're gonna need it, all of it. 

HP SimpleSave - Revisited

Last year I added an HP SimpleSave 1TB External Hard Drive to my ever expanding desktop disk farm, and I did a post shortly thereafter extolling its virtues. Not only did it increase my storage capacity, it also automatically backs up my systems on a regular basis, and it’s large enough to be useful for both purposes.

After having it in service for a few months, I’m still pleased with the device, but… I have a little user tip that I’m way overdue in sharing.

This drive kicks off an auto backup after 5 minutes of system inactivity, which is a great way to insure that you’re always backed up, but the timer settings can’t be tweaked, and if you have a document open the SimpleSave program write locks it in preparation for backup after about 4 minutes of idle time. That’s just too short. It’s so short that even a quick bio break can trigger it.

Usually my first hint of trouble is an error message that pops up to the effect of: “Saving the Auto Recovery file is postponed for (your file name here)”, which means that Word has tried to do an auto-save on the document, and failed.

The consequence is that any changes you’ve made since the last time you’ve saved it, or the last time Word has done an auto-save, are going to be lost when you close the document. Word still prompts you to save the document when you try to close it, but that fails also.

When it catches me, I’ve usually just started creating a document and I’m cooking along, so when I see that error message I know the whole thing will be lost if I don’t engage in evasive maneuvers.

If it catches you, the fix is simple, although it’s a pain. Click Edit, Select All, and then Copy. Now close the document without saving changes, and then open it again, click on Edit and Select All again, and then paste.

Note: Be sure to go down to the system tray, right click on SimpleSave and selct Exit before you go any further, otherwise you’ll be painting yourself into the same corner.

The real fix is to either remove SimpleSave from your startup, or right click on the system tray icon and select exit before you start anything. I prefer to leave it in the startup and then kill it when I’m going to be working. It’s a pain, but that way I don’t have to sweat whether or not I’ve done a backup in times of crises.

Of course, the ultimate would be if HP made the idle time setting selectable, but I’m not holding my breath. I will, however, be holding my water.

That is all.

HP SimpleSave 1TB External Hard Drive

The HP SimpleSave 1TB external hard drive is a great buy for $99. It’s sharp, roomy, quiet and self contained, as its automatic backup software runs right off of the drive. The only thing it installs on your computer is a virtual CD drive that autoruns on boot, starting the auto backup procedure, which I must admit is pretty slick. The HP window launches, and gives you a 30 second countdown before it starts its backup, which is plenty of time to either cancel it if you’re not ready, or change the options.

It comes preconfigured to back up most file types and locations, and allows you to add more. The only fault here is that it won’t take wildcards when you’re adding new extensions, but believe me, there’s not many you’ll need to add. You also have the option to have it back up other external drives, or not. Once you start the backup, the program assesses your files and presents you with a really comprehensive rundown of exactly what it’s going to copy, and from where. If you're happy you can kick it off, if not, you can add or subtract things.

The first time you use it, it does a full backup which took about 2 hours on my Media Center (170GB of video, pictures and music), not too bad. It creates a backup folder and uses the computer’s name for the label, so you can backup multiple systems and still find things easily. When it’s done, it presents you with a report telling you exactly what it copied or skipped due to errors.

After the first use, it will backup only files that have been modified or added, and it will start the procedure itself any time the system has been idle for more than fifteen minutes, making backups a breeze. Some reviewers have stated that they didn’t like the autorun software, and I was a little skeptical myself at first. After all, I’d hate to have a drive that big that was just a one trick pony, but it’s not. You don’t have to use the autorun software to reload files, although it does make things pretty easy. You can drill right down into the backup folders and grab any file you like. I also created a separate folder on it to transfer selected content from all of my portable drives, and I’ve barely made a dent in it’s free space.


All in all, you can’t go wrong with this baby for under a hundred bucks. It also comes in both a 1.5TB and 2TB size for $129 and $159, respectively, so you can start your own disk farm!

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