What’s the most important, irreplaceable thing in your possession? The memories of the experiences you had. If you took photos of your wedding, or a video of your child’s first steps, you trust your hard drive to store this data.
The next most important thing is your personal information and financial documents. These records are crucial to navigating bureaucracy and accounting for your business. And they get saved on your computer’s hard drive as well. But you should know that hard drives can fail.
The statistics on hard drive failure seem disheartening. A study conducted by BackBlaze, (a cloud backup company) found that 10% of hard drives fail after three years, and 20% after five years. At Prosoft Engineering’s sister company, The Data Rescue Center, we receive hard drives mangled by physical damage, old age, and corruptions. We do our best to get them back into working condition. Unfortunately, some data is unrecoverable.
That’s why we created a user friendly backup software that automates your backups for Mac and Windows users. Data Backup Mac and Data Backup PC allow you to customize your backups and receive alerts to your email or phone about the status of the backup. We created this simple backup software because we never want to see data lost from another hard drive crash again.
By backing up your data, you prepare for the worst possible scenarios that can happen in life. Maybe your house gets broken into, and your computer is stolen. Maybe a natural disaster hits; like an earthquake for Californians, a tornado for Mid-Westerners, or a hurricane if you live in the South. A normal power outage can fry the coding of your hard drive. Or you can accidentally lose your hard drive. There are plenty of threats in the modern world to your data.
So be prepared beforehand. Have an active, working backup of your important documents, music, videos, and images in a secondary location. Disasters such as electrical outages, viruses, physical theft, and dust can disturb your hard drive enough that you need to use your backup. You can check out our blog for more information on protecting your hard drive from the elements of life.
If you lose your files in a tragic accident, there is no guarantee you can get your data back. You can try data recovery software such as Data Rescue, or for serious cases, a data recovery service center. But those procedures will cost you time and money, without even counting the priceless memories lost, or the valuable business hours taken up by the error.
Our data recovery software is currently priced at $79. If you add this to the time spent waiting for your hard drive to be scanned, this can add up to several hundred dollars of down time. If there is a physical error in your hard drive, a recovery service can cost over one thousand dollars, and take several weeks in the worst case scenario. As you can see, data recovery is an expensive and time consuming process.
Having a safe backup will give you peace of mind. This is invaluable in today’s world. With everything being so hectic, it’s important to have one corner of your life secure. Having a backup is much like having insurance. If a disaster happens, you don’t have to pay the full cost of the accident.
By backing up your data, you ensure redundancy of your most important files. Depending on the type of backup you’re using, you can edit, move, and re-format files without worrying about having the original copy. You can have two hard drives synchronized with the same contents, and you can schedule the backup to run at a certain hour every day. Or you can have a backup option that re-writes only the newest incremental changes to the files each time.
If you look at every industry in the world, the leaders of these industries ensure themselves against data loss by backing up their files. A friend of mine working on a construction site appeals committee says they backup their files everyday. Many photographers and video artists have learned the hard way to save their files once the shoot is over. And when my laptop was stolen sophomore year of college, I luckily had saved my most important project onto an external flash drive. This made the theft not as detrimental as it could have been.
By having an extra layer of redundancy, you protect your important documents, photos, and videos on your computer and in your backup drive. Make sure to backup your files today!
You should periodically check that your backup is working properly, and that your files are up-to-date. Often times, we notice that when a customer desperately needs their backup, the files are two months late and almost un-useable. So it pays off to have a regularly updating backup software automated to your scheduling needs.
You also want to check that all of your hard drives are fully functional and healthy. Prosoft Engineering offers their popular Drive Genius software for complete hard drive optimization and protection. This software runs in the background of your computer, checking for every type of physical and logical error. Drive Genius can even alert you to potential hard drive failure before it happens!
Backing up your data seems to be a simple solution in today’s modern world. So many of the problems we see can be avoided by having a second copy of your important information. If you don’t know the proper management of your data, check this blog out for a complete guide on how to backup your data. But if you know what you’re doing, and want to save yourself from hassle and expense, backup your data!
My name is Jeremy, and I write for Prosoft Engineering. I am passionate about hard drive disaster prevention and recovery. In my free time, I like to read classic literature and explore the Bay Area.