"Backup the backup of your backup."

A wise, old IT guru gave me two pieces of advice when I chose IT as my profession. First, 90% of networking issues will be DNS related so learn it. Second, backup the backup of your backup. Many years later these two pieces of advice still hold true. However, one has become cheaper and easier over the years—backups.

You would be surprised how often I get a late night phone call saying, “I was just checking my email and BAM! everything is gone on my computer,” or, “I just went to turn on my computer and it won’t start.” For me, that’s when the real fun starts. Usually the first question from the user is, “What is going to happen to all my pictures and all my music?” They don’t realize that all their financial info, homework etc. is at jeopardy too until I ask them what other type of data they have on their hard drive. That’s when the look of panic sets in. And when I ask if their data was backed up, 90% of the time I get the response, “What?!” followed by a pause, then the answer, “No.”

This is when it starts to get interesting. Without going into all the techie details, most of the time a malware or virus clean up will fix the problem and the user is good to go with lesson learned, hopefully! But unfortunately, there are too many times when the hard drive went south and the user is up a creek without a paddle.

Bottom line—every company should have a good backup and recovery plan. Granted, nothing is ever 100% but your IT staff should do their best to protect your valuable data. It costs a lot of time and money to recreate or restore lost data, if recovery is possible. The same holds true with your personal computer’s data. We spend hours taking pictures and video of events in our lives just to have it pile up on our computer’s hard drive until that old hard drive kicks the bucket.

These days there are plenty of cost effective ways to back your personal data. With all the cloud based storage now available, a quick Google search can help you find online storage offering various amounts of free storage space. Pick one that’s right for your needs. Also, an external hard drive is another good backup source. Terabyte external hard drives can be found for under $100 nowadays. I recommend putting data on non-erasable media. Get a spindle of DVD-R’s or a few Blu-ray discs and burn the data. You won’t be sorry.

For a little bit of time and a little of money you can protect your valuable data. You’ll sleep better. And so will I, knowing you won’t be calling me in the middle of the night.