Data Hoards, Time to Backup!
In a perfect world, we would not have system failures, data corruption and situations where data was simply deleted. The golden age of computing is upon us where people have generated a tremendous amount of data doing everyday things such as taking photos, collecting a music library of MP3s, or simply downloading stuff from the internet. Some data we may value more than others, but as bad habits go we usually keep everything until we get the message “YOUR SYSTEM IS FULL”. It’s natural that we all hoard data – some we are aware of and some we simply don’t know where it came from. It somehow got stored on our hard drives by way of downloading and or after we just installed something on our computers. Either case, the data will sit there growing and growing.
We all know that this is not a perfect world and our computers will fail, heck we may decide to delete a bunch of folders not realizing what we may want was in there. Time to do backups!
There is a plethora of backup devices today at your local Best Buy, Staples, and online stores. They come in forms of ready to backup external USB drives starting at under $100bucks, USB memory sticks that have lots of storage space, SD and MicroSD cards. All these can be purchased and ready to back up your data at just about any large retail store.
On the other end of the spectrum, there are the device-less backup services that can simply back up your data over the internet—all securely of course. You probably have heard of iCloud that came with the iPhone you just purchase, you may have heard of GoogleDrive, Carbonite, Mozy Pro, and even ITAnywhere Vault! All these are backup services that can back up just about any type of data you have generated on your computers and devices. You just need to simply install some small software package from them and begin the count down. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 ! Backup sequence has started. Besides making it easy, pricing is also great as well. Cost can range anywhere between a few bucks a month to $30 and up for more storage and recovery features. There are business grade options as well if you are running a small business.
In the end, we ask all ask the basic question: what is your data worth to you? The simple answer is that all data is worth everything when we need it. Go ahead spend a few bucks and have a piece of mind that you have a copy of this data secured somewhere. Do cheap out and don’t forget to back up because it’s going to cost you a lot more than just money in the long run.
