Is your Data worth losing forever?

If you have been living under a rock for the last 10 years you will notice everything we do now is basically in some sort of digital form. Newspapers, magazines, books, VHS tapes, DVDs, reruns of TV shows, CDS, cassette tapes, 8tracks (Had 2 say it), taxe forms, are all being replaced in digital format & saved on our computers. The problem is too many people do not seem to realize that you cannot always trust computers to last forever, when you keep copies of these items on them.

I was at Best Buy a few weeks ago and I heard a lady go off at one of the Geek Squad members. Usually I laugh at these poor guys all the time but I felt sorry for this guy. A lady went to get her computer fixed, and found out she needed a new hard drive. All the data was lost and could not be recovered. She was upset as she lost all of her photos of her kids, work documents, music from the last 6 years all due to the hard drive going bad.

I once learned like this poor lady that once you experience a failure with technology you can rarely get everything back. Since my senior year in high school, I have not lost documents, pictures, music files, program installation files, etc to date ~knock on wood~.

Like most users I have an external USB drive where I keep all my files. I’ve trusted it for over 3years now and I think it is time to replace it. You can’t trust it forever! $100 is a tough pill for some people to swallow every 3 years for this type of item, but let me ask you this... How much is your data worth to you? Do you want to go back and pay for books, music, movies, and rewrite work documents all over again? Do you want to lose those memories of you and your family or friends on vacation? I sure as hell don’t want to.

No method is fool proof but today I wanted to offer some free nerdly advice for anyone who reads this and wants to protect their data.  The process of backing up to these is very simple. A lot of them come with software that can offer step by step procedures of running automated software. What I do is create folders on the USB drive, and move everything into those folders. Then once a month, or whenever you want, update your backup.

But what if you are like me and have a 3year old USB drive that sounds like it is on its last leg. Well take this into consideration, when you buy your new one keep the old one, and put it in a safe deposit box, or fire proof safe. Why not have a backup of a backup? This way in the event of a natural disaster you still have your data. Maybe do a backup on it once every 3mths or something. When 3yrs rolls around you destroy the oldest drive (I like using hammers to take my anger out at it, or lighter fluid and fire), rotate your other drives.

Its very simple folks. Unless you know a super nerd that’s a virgin who has no life and rebuilds the bad drive into a new drive &charges $5000 for this process in a static free room (Sorry I dont have that much free time & patience to pull that stuff apart & do that let alone a static room) dont come cryin to me.