I received a reminder of this VERY IMPORTANT tip from my friend Joe Sabah this week.
[title size=”2″]Yvonne & Joe’s Tip: Backup your computer[/title]
I’ve dealt with this issue multiple times over the last 20 years. It seems technology conspires against me sometimes.
- In college, I lost half a semester’s work when my floppy disk died. (yes, this was before thumb drives and external hard drives.)
- Nine years ago, my hard drive corrupted and wiped out about 6 years of irreplaceable images from my architectural and interior design portfolio. (That one hurt major time!)
- Four years ago, I thought I had it down…I scanned four years of data onto an external hard drive that was going to be backed up to CD. Little did I know that the clicking noise it was making was the sound of a hard drive dieing. (I think the universe was saying that I was not meant to have a portfolio of architecture work in hind sight.)
- I was working for a firm that was backing up their system every night (or so they thought). Let’s just say that was not a pretty sight when files corrupted…
I recently learned that I have run out of space to back up my computer on the spare drive…so now on to identifying a new solution.
WHY? As noted above, the information is irreplaceable. Once it is gone on a dead hard drive, there is typically no recovering it. I have recovered a couple of hard drives at great expense, but not the important ones.
While your insurance may cover time down in the case of a disaster (if you are paying for that insurance), it still does not change the fact that the data is gone. Nor does it take into account all of the time that is required to rebuild or recover the data.
Joe recommends offsite Computer Backup storage for extra security. He has been using a backup system called Carbonite. For $48 a year, or $4 a month, his computer is backed up constantly. www.carbonite.com
Other options dependent on the size of your data:
- Second (or third in my case if I go this route) internal hard drive
- External hard drive
- Thumb drive
Considering my record, I’ll be looking for something redundant (ie. two backup areas!)
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