Ulverstone IT – Article July 2024

This article was printed in The Central Coast Voice community newspaper in July 2024.

Ulverstone IT is a new Computer Support Business looking to help the community and businesses use their technology better. We are a registered Small Business Mentor, providing 4 funded hours or mentoring per year with Digital Solutions Tasmania, who are supported by the Australian Government. We can connect you with business mentors all over Tasmania in many different fields. Contact David to help start or grow your business.

Title: Backup, Please Backup! Please Seriously Backup!?

Ulverstone IT has visited many people in the community and turned on their phone or computer backup systems. In many cases, this is simply turning on the built-in options to save your precious photos, documents, or life history to an external device or through a business like Microsoft or Apple to securely store them on your behalf.

Losing photos or files, like losing your wallet, can cause a lot of distress. And unlike your Wallet, its generally not as simple as waiting for someone to hand it into the local police station.

Apple and Android phones have built in support to back up your phone to a computer elsewhere. This means if the phone breaks or is lost, the new phone can receive all the information from the Internet and appear just like the original phone with personal information, contacts, photos, and notes. You can also access this information from a web browser if its urgent.

Microsoft and MacOS both include free backup solutions to keep a copy of everything elsewhere, but they need to be turned on and told where to store it all. This can be an external USB Hard Drive that many businesses sell. Both Apple and Microsoft also provide internet-based backup solutions for a small charge if you have fast home WIFI or work internet service.

For external USB Drives and Thumb drives, please be aware that storing information on these is no different than storing it on your computer; you need to have a backup. USB Drives will fail or get lost somewhere, so if your only copy of an important file is stored on an external USB Drive, get another drive and regularly copy everything over to the second drive.

Please reach out to your preferred computer support business and ask them to make sure all your information has another location, and you know how to access it.