Backups are one of the most often forgotten aspects of computer usage. Someone once said there are two kinds of hard drives; ones that have failed and ones that will fail. Hard drive failure is a common problem that can have devastating effects, both personally and with your business.
No computer repair tech ever wants to get a call where someone says “The hard drive has failed, and we have no backup”. Data can sometimes be recovered using advanced software and recovery techniques, but often the hard drive has had a catastrophic failure and nothing can be recovered.
Another increasingly common scenario is ransomware where your files are encrypted by rogue software and the only way to get it unencrypted is to pay a “ransom” to the hackers that encrypted it. There is no guarantee that they will actually unlock it after taking your money.
The good news is protecting your data has never been easier. The two best approaches for most people are cloud backup services like Carbonite, or cloud based collaborative solutions like Google drive or dropbox. The latter not only protects your data from hard drive failure and ransomware, but it makes sharing files very easy which is particularly handy for businesses.
If you have data you don’t want to lose and you don’t have any backups in place, we can’t stress enough the importance of setting up some backups as soon as possible. We have seen too many disasters where people have lost irreplaceable files like family pictures or critical business documents.