Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
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Regular readers of this blog know I’m always mentioning how important it is to create regular backups of your computer’s hard drive or SSD.
After all, always having a recent backup on hand is the very best “insurance” you can have against a catastrophic drive failure or a crippling virus infection.
But there’s one important point that I probably don’t stress nearly as much as I should…
Question from Joyce: I’m constantly taking pictures of my grandkids and copying them onto my computer. And since I don’t want to lose them I keep my computer backed up with Carbonite.
But a nagging question has been bugging me for a while now.
Since Carbonite backs up my files automatically, how can I prevent it from backing up a virus too should I ever get one on my PC? [Read more…]
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Question from Ellen: Hi, Rick. I’m a freelance graphic artist and I do all of my work on a Dell desktop computer running Windows 11.
I have hundreds of images that have either already been delivered to the customer or waiting to be delivered, and about a dozen more that are works in progress.
The problem is my husband and daughter also use this computer for Facebook, homework and games. I’m deathly afraid that my important files might get deleted somehow.
Is there a dependable and secure way to make sure they don’t end up getting deleted somehow? [Read more…]
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Question from Kendra: Hi, Rick. I really love your blog, especially the section where you answer questions from your readers.
If you don’t mind I’d like to ask a question of my own.
Back in March of 2020 the tech guy I used at the time installed a Crucial 500GB SSD in my Acer laptop and it really made it run a lot faster.
I recently read on another site that all SSDs wear out over time because they can only be written to a certain number of times.
That has me sort of worried because this drive is now about four years old and I have a lot of personal files on it that I don’t want to lose.
My question is do you think this drive is likely to fail at some time in the near future? [Read more…]
Question from Claire: I recently lost the iPhone I’d had for several years so I bought a new one to replace it.
That’s not really a bad thing because I’d been looking for an excuse to buy a new one (smile).
The thing is I still have the backup from the old iPhone stored in my iCloud account. How can I get rid of it?
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]