It amazes me how many people out there do not backup their files on a regular basis. I don’t know how many times I have heard from friends, family and even the occasional acquaintance about how their computer’s hard drive decided not to work anymore. It just stopped. That was it. No more. Some of these same people carried massive amounts of information on their laptops or home computers and would back it up when they thought about it every few months. Then when their computer died, the work they had done over the past month or two was completely lost.

There are ways to get information off a hard drive after it has gone bad, but they are not cheap. There are businesses out there that specialize in data recovery. They spend hours restoring what data they can from a dead hard drive. There is no guarantee that all the information can be recovered. The reason the hard drive died in the first place is because parts of the drive became unreadable.

Your hard drive will most likely die eventually. It is only a matter of time. The best way to keep from loosing information when this happens is to regularly backup your data. This can be done on CD or DVD from you operating software. I have heard some people who had two hard drives in their computer and backed up all their files from one drive to the other. If you have a network with a server, you could always backup the files to that server.

One of the newest ways that I have found is backing up your files online with a service that specializes in data storage. This is great because the data is not kept in the same place as your computer. So if your house or place of business burns down or floods or blows away in a hurricane, you should still be able to recover that data because it was not onsite where the damage happened.

One such company is idrive.com. Right now they offer FREE 2GB backup storage with no bandwidth limits. You can store your photos, media files or other important documents. This service is best suited for individuals and families. They have a pro version for companies or individuals who keep large numbers of files (like podcasts or videos). Take a moment to check out idrive.com. If you decide not to take advantage of their FREE offer, at least find another way to backup your computer files once a week. You never know when something bad is going to happen to your computer.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 5th, 2007 at 3:50 am and is filed under My View on Current Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.