What on earth do you mean?Quite simple really, I am asking when you have to erase your device and start all over again do you restore from back up or do you prefer to try and rebuild from a back up of the original machine? The answer only really comes up when you find yourself with a situation that requires you to erase your hardware and reinstall, replace the damaged device or even replace a stollen device. Your choice of how to resolve the restoration of your information is important because the problems you may of had in the past could be stored inside the backups you made previously.

The backing up stagesHopefully you are wise and careful when it comes to using your digital devices and take care to secure your data as you go. Though to many of us are not, laziness makes us feel sure that "we" will not be the one to loose everything through some calamity. However it can so easily be just that which happens. So with that in mind backing up is truly essentially, because we all carry so much with us on our portable devices that could arguably called important and would not wish to loose.

So with that in mind I suggest you check out this website which lists the best online back up services. You could also try any of the following online storage systems like Google Drive, Dropbox and Box for an easy place to put things securely and away from harm.

If you prefer to keep your stuff same from harm but local to yourself, like in the same room as you work then i suggest any good external hard drive will do nicely. Most come with a backing up function as well so you can easily tell the drive what to secure and what to ignore.

What ever option you choose it is essential that it be done.

So what is clean or dirty about?Well for a seasoned technology type like myself I am keenly aware that when my gadgets go wrong it is usually best to get rid of all internal non personal stuff and start over. Just so I know that I have done everything I could to clean it before restarting the device and carrying on. This is what i call a "clean restore", a "dirty restore" would be the opposite where I choose to just restore from the backup i most recently did without being certain that it has not been compromised.

I know that whenever my iPad, iPhone or even my Macbook Pro starts going wrong regularly i prefer to secure the important stuff, music and photo libraries for example and the erase the machines and start over. Granted this is pretty involved, but it gets the job done. 9 times out of 10 at least.

Final ThoughtsReally it comes right down to this, when we restore our devices from a backup, are we bringing back the offending problem that caused the crash in the first place? Or are we being careful to not waste time and resources on a long and tiresome restore when something goes wrong. Personally I like the way Apple does things,letting you back up your hardware to either a local drive or to the iCloud system if it is an iOS device.

What are your methods? How do you secure your data? What information is crucial to you? What would you do if it was all gone one day? Could you get any of it back? All these questions are worth asking. Think seriously about what you have read here and write in if you fancy extending this discussion.