The Pain of Data Loss

How important is data backup?

If you’re one of the thousands of Americans who answered, “Huh?” then you might want to check your computer. You might have just lost all of your family photos.

Or your client database, or your tax information, or your home movies, or your emails. When a hard drive goes down, and you haven’t backed up, you lose everything. Your choices are either paying for data recovery from a company such as ESS Data Recovery, or curling up into a ball and accepting your loss with the help of a bottle of Jack Daniels.

Hopefully, this hasn’t happened to you. If it has, you know the pain data loss can cause, financially and emotionally. Luckily, you needn’t face data loss if you back up your data.

There are many ways to backup your information. Below is a list of a few of the most popular ways, as well as a few general tips to keep in mind.

External Hard Drives

External hard drives are a great way to back up large amounts of data. They range in size from a few gigabytes to hundreds of gigabytes, and if you’re computer literate, you merely need to copy your necessary files to one of these drives for a little extra peace of mind. If you’re not, there are some hard drives specialized for backup that come with backup software. This software, such as Retrospect HD, allows you to back up either specific files, filetypes, newly modified files, or your entire drive to an external drive. Maxtor’s OneTouch series includes such software, and has a button on the front of their drives that triggers a backup. You can also set up backup drives to make a copy of your recently modified data every night while you sleep, which is great if you’re not good at remembering to backup.

There are a few problems with external hard drives. First of all, they tend to be expensive for vast amounts of data. This can be a problem for many home users. Secondly, an external hard drive is, well, a hard drive, and will eventually fail like any other drive. If you leave your external drive hooked up to your computer, and you have a major electrical problem , you might lose both drives. Then it’s back to the bottle of Jack Daniels.

You can avoid such a disaster by keeping your computer hooked up to a surge protector and checking your drive regularly for unusual noises. Problem noises include clicking sounds, whirring sounds, and the occasional “HELLPPP MEEEE!”