The threat of data loss exists with almost every click of your mouse. Life in the online world can be dangerous. Smart companies will do whatever it takes to minimize that risk.
Have you ever lost all the data on a floppy disk and had to redo an entire afternoon’s work? Perhaps you have made a music or game CD unusable due to a small scratch? Perhaps you have experienced a complete hard drive crash that resulted in gigabytes of lost data and months, even YEARS of wasted effort.
The “worst case scenario” happened to me a few years ago. I received a call from a friend informing me that my house had been broken into and that the thieves had not only stolen the electronics from the living room, but also the computers in the house. I learned the hard way that data backup is something every computer user who has important data on their hard drive cannot live without. Whether you simply buy an external drive that you can connect via USB or Firewire, or sign up for external data backup, be sure to take the necessary steps to ensure your data is safe and sound, even if you the worst happens to your computer hardware.
It doesn’t hit you right away when you no longer have access to your data. The first thing that comes to mind is the expensive hardware that was used to build your machine. Maybe you had a good flat screen monitor or a high-end video card to play the latest games. While it can be very disappointing to lose expensive tech products like these, it still doesn’t compare to losing those 0’s and 1’s etched on every user’s hard drive. Hardware can almost always be replaced, even at no cost to you if you have insurance, but lost data is gone forever. There is no way to recover unbacked up data if you lose the original media it was stored on.
In my case, I wasn’t using secure off-site data backup, or any kind of backup. My backup was about six months old and was on a tape drive in my closet. When those thieves took my machine, they took not only a great gaming rig, but also my entire web design portfolio, numerous custom versions of my resume, THOUSANDS of MP3s I ripped from CDs (many of which had lost the original CD), Microsoft Money files, and thousands of digital photos that are impossible to replace.
Take a moment and think about all the important digital files you have on your computer and ask yourself if it’s worth investing a little of your time and money in a remote online backup solution to make sure that data is available to you. lifetime.
Your DATA is your LIFE. Protect it!