Everybody hears the commercials on talk radio, TV and in magazines on Carbonite and other online computer data backup services. “Backup your computer or you’ll be sorry!” That’s the message that they’re pushing. If you don’t backup your computer data, it’s just a matter of ‘when’ not ‘if’ your computer will crash and all your precious data will be gone…and then what will you do?
I learned this lesson the hard way many years ago. I had a computer crash and lost everything on it. Luckily, I had my data ‘backedup’ in the form of floppy disks. Guess what? When I went to restore my data on a new computer, it wasn’t compatible or couldn’t be retrieved off the 3.5” floppy disks. Turns out I didn’t have ANYTHING backed up. These are lessons learned the hard way. I had to rebuild my data base from bits and pieces of data contained in reports and notes in files. I was doing commercial and industrial real estate appraisals at the time. I had databases of information on property sales, with all kinds of specific data recorded. I had flood map data, employment statistics, all kinds of demographics and economic development statistics on the communities where I practiced. I had hundreds of scripts written on different communities, construction types, sales situations, definitions and what have you. I had been building this database over a ten year period and in an instant, it was gone.
After this incident, I was religious about backing up my data…for a while.
Last week, my computer died. Just like in the Carbonite ads, it’s not a matter of ‘if’, but ‘when’. This time I really did get lucky in that my mother board went out and my data was still safe on my hard drive. However, I also have a subscription to Carbonite, so I didn’t lose any data. I bought a new computer, restored my data and I’m back in business. No problem. Who says you can’t teach an old dog a new trick?
So, how do you back up your data? DO you backup your data? If you have anything important on your computer, give your backup process a little attention today, before you regret it tomorrow.
That’s true. Computer problems often happen when you least expect them, so doing things like backing up your important documents in the cloud or in a separate hard drive is practically a necessity. One other option for backing up important documents is storing them in your Google Drive. You can upload Word documents, spreadsheets and presentations in there for easy access and safe storage as well. Best thing about it is, it’s for free so you don’t have to spend a single cent!
ReplyDeleteRoberta Scott @ Spectrum Information Services