Protect Your Stuff
I know to some of you I probably sound like a broken record when it comes to talking about backing up your data. However, I have witnessed too many instances of lost data because a computer has not been backed up.
Consider the following scenarios: I have one customer who lost all of his family photos when the hard drive of his computer died. He did not have a backup system in place.
In another scenario, I recently did a new computer installation where the data on the old computer had never been backed up. The price of the computer installation doubled as I spent a great deal of time retrieving data from the old computer to the new computer.
Backup Facts
Here are some facts about data backup that you need to know
You WILL experience data loss on your computer, sooner or later.
Data retrieval from a hard drive can take time, meaning money, depending on the amount of data you have.
Hard drives die on a regular basis.
40%-69% of small businesses never reopen after a data disaster.
Only 23% of businesses back up daily.
The majority of people who actually have a backup plan in place, don’t know how the backup works, or even check to see if it is working.
Backup Options
What are your backup options? I am so glad you asked. In my mind, you have three options:
Use a cloud service for all your data. Dropbox, SkyDrive, Google Drive, iCloud, and the list is endless. These services are fantastic, but have limitations. Some only store particular types of files, while others store most file types, but don’t give you a lot of storage space.
Use an external hard drive. These are great devices, and are getting less expensive and increasing capacity all the time. However, unless you have a good rotation and offsite storage method, the external backup drives will not save your data in case of a disaster. Consider maybe fire, flood, theft, locusts maybe? Any number of things can happen to an external drive, including the death of the drive. I have seen many of these drives die over the years.
Use an online backup service. An online backup service will transfer your data over the internet to a data center for storage. A good online backup service will encrypt your data before it leaves your computer, and use a secure connection. The data centers should be state-of-the-art with extremely high security standards.
At ComputerDiva, we use a combination of cloud services, external drives, as well as an online backup service. Every one of our computers has it’s own external drive attached that backs up data as it is added or changed. We have a Dropbox account for files needed no matter where we go, as we have the Dropbox app on our iPhones and iPad’s. Each computer also has a subscription to Mozy online backup. We chose Mozy, after using Carbonite and SugarSync, because it is just so easy, and the service is incredible.
Savings!
We believe in Mozy so strongly that we talked them into extending a 10% discount off the initial purchase price of any Mozy product or subscription. This discount is good for the month of March 2013, so act now. Head over to our Products page to get the discount code! http://www.computerdiva.biz/products.
If you would like an evaluation of your backup strategy, feel free to call us at 360-567-8838. We are always happy to assist.