Backing Up Your Data Frequently Can Save You Money

Information Technology Companies and Internet Business rely on their data being safe and available. Hard drives that hold your valued data can break at any time and might be a great loss to your operations. Here is some things you might want to consider for you backups.

Why Backup ?

The problem with backups is that sometimes we are too busy with our work and tend to forget to backup our digital data every once in a while, which can lead to some serious consequences. Most people never think a hard drive crash will happen to them. This mentality can be devastating. It generally starts with something like, 'My hard drive failed.' And end with, 'How can I get back the files of the project I was working on for the last month?' To avoid this nightmare again, you must sit down and ask yourself 'what are you going to do to prevent something like this in the future?'

Computer viruses are everywhere and they are spreading from computer to computer through the internet or through removable media with great speeds. The viruses are always ahead of the Antivirus programs and thus you can't always trust when they say your hard drive is clean from viruses.

Hard Drives contain tiny mechanical parts and this makes them vulnerable to mechanical errors and failures. Hard drives fail without warning us of a disaster coming. That kind of disaster happens more often than you might think. Information gets lost all the time on the Internet and on the Desktop hard drives. Statistically its almost impossible for two of your hard drives to fail at the same time.

What to do ?

If you have only one drive, go buy one. Hard drives are pretty cheap nowadays which allows you to backup another copy of your data. Another form of backup that is becoming very popular is the use of what are called key or removable drives. Key drives are tiny drives which can fit on your key chain but can still hold a few gigabytes of data. CD or DVD backup is another option that you might want to consider.

Make it a habit to hold all your important information and all the data you produce with your computer in an easy navigable way. Keeping things scattered all over your computers folder system makes so much harder to backup all of them. Make a folder in your C drive and name it projects and keep in there every project in its own folder. Remember to copy the projects folder to your backup drive at the end of day or week depending on how sensitive your data is.

There are programs that can assist you with your backup and synchronization. There are professional solutions for this but they are quite costly. For individual or small companies shareware or even freeware backup utilities might be enough. Spending a little time getting to know them and use them properly might save you lots of money when time comes and you are in need of a previous day's backup.

If your hard drive fails and you have not made proper backups of your projects "data recovery software" might come in for the rescue. Depending on the severity of the damage data might not be able to be recovered with software solutions. Professional data recovery services are available online for the worst case scenarios that all else fails.