Its YOUR opportunity to ask a question, any tech related question and we will do our level best to give you our best advice.  If you want to submit a question, just send me an email to [email protected] and add “Dear Dave” to the subject line.

On to our question …

Dear Dave,

For years I have always used an external hard drive to back up all my important files, but recently I had to try to retrieve a file from my backup and it was there, but it was on old version!  Much to my chagrin, the backup software hasn’t been working for over a year!  What should I do?

Betrayed in Bedford

Dear Betrayed,

Having a backup, any backup is great!  However, as you found out its only half of a good strategy to safeguard against losing important files.  The second half is TESTING your backup by doing a periodic test restore.  For example, my wife and I have THOUSANDS of pictures of our kids and we know that these are irreplaceable so about once a month I do a restore of one of the files that have been backed up.  Depending on your setup, this can be done in many ways.  But just doing this (I have a reminder in my calendar every month) gives us the peace of mind knowing that when something happens (it always does with technology!) we will not lose these pictures no matter what.  It also helps that we have multiple copies in multiple locations – locally on a hard drive, an external backup drive as well as online with our Carbonite backup.