Backup Your Data
Are you backing up your data on a regular basis? If you are, that’s great and I commend you for that. If you’re not it’s something you might want to consider. Because really, it’s not a matter of if it happens, it’s more a matter of when it happens. It can be easy to procrastinate about, but did you know a USB or local hard drive will fail 15% of the time within 5 years?
Offsite backup services are really the best choice. I mean what happens if someone breaks into your house and steals your computer and your hard drive, and perhaps grabbed your box of backup DVDs. What if there’s a flood or a fire and all your precious data gets ruined? I’ve seen this happen before to several customers who neglected to do proper backup. Stop and think for a minute, what would happen if we lost all our business data? What would it cost us (me)? What about all those digital pictures you have on your personal computer? In the old days of film your negatives were usually your backup copy, but with digital most of us have all of our pictures on a hard drive or backup CD or DVD laying around the house or office somewhere.
There are several online backup services out there. I’ve been using Mozy for the backup of my critical data and Amazon S3 with JungleDisc to back up larger amounts of data such as older documents, history, pictures or anything else that I would like to keep for the long term. They are very reasonably priced and they really don’t take that long to set up. The good thing is once they’re set up you can configure them for automatic backup at predetermined intervals.
Just something to think about.
Make it a great day!