Backup your Data!

As an operator of an IT Consulting business I’ve seen firsthand, many times, how little it takes to lose years worth of precious data.  Your years of pictures, or archived tax returns often only exist as bits and bytes on a single hard drive.  Did you know that hard drive manufacturers know your hard drive is going to fail?  It is not that they want it to, having mechanical parts it is only a matter of time.  Granted, it is a long time, typically between 1 and 2 million operating hours, but this serves to illustrate that you need to have other systems in place to ensure the integrity of your data.

Most people, by this time, have either experienced some form of data loss, or know someone who has, and while the awareness of the need is there, people still don’t know how to go about it.  I see people who still burn data to CD/DVDs, people who copy data to flash drive and keep it on their person, and people who backup to external hard drives.  All of these are fine, except they rely on your remembering to do this.  So then I hear “Yes I do my own backups, my last backup was 2 months ago…”  Uh oh, 2 months of lost data will certainly cause some grief.

Systems such as SaberSync are a perfect solution, your data is continuously backed up to remote data centers, because SaberSync acts as a unique drive (Just like a thumb drive), there is no learning curve, and no chance of ‘not getting around to it’.

The next blog entry I’ll describe how my hard drive failed on me, and how I was up and running right away with no data loss!