Never do today what you can put off till tomorrow. Sound familiar? That was always my motto (still is sometimes) but as far as backing up my computer, procrastinating is the last thing I do! I have learned my lesson after losing precious data from multiple hard drive crashes! Think disaster wont strike your computer? I have news for you: statistics show that 1 in every 4 computer users suffers a critical data loss every year. Laptops are stolen and hard drives crash; its a fact of life. If youve never seen a grown man cry, wait till his computer crashes! Still, Ive heard many excuses from other computer users about why they dont backup their machines. Well, they might sound good, but they really do not hold up. I conducted a small survey among computer users to find the most popular excuses. The top three excuses are shown below, along with my rebuttals. 3. I dont know how. Nows the time to learn. If you have learned to use a computer, you can learn to backup your files. It can be as simple as burning a CD or clicking on folders and selecting back this up. Find the nearest computer whiz and tell them you want to back up your data. Or just browse the internet for data backup. Someone will be happy to help. (After losing a lot of my data due to hard drive crashes, Im happy to help people backup their data.) 2. Its too expensive. Backup does not have to cost an arm and a leg. Although some services are very expensive, it is possible to backup all of your data for a few dollars every month. What do CD-Rs cost these days, a couple cents each? Even one top-notch online backup service is a mere $5 per month. You buy insurance for your house and car, right? Think of data backup as insurance for your documents and digital photos. (Remember, even if your insurance covers the cost of your computer during a catastrophe, they will not cover your data loss, which most likely is worth more than the computer itself.) And the #1 reason 1. It takes too long. This reason would actually be better stated as Im too busy! or Im lazy! but I figured I would combine those into one sentence! If you burn CDs with all of your data, then yes, it takes a while. But even that does not take as long as trying to start over from scratch once you have lost everything! Just think if you lost everything. What would you do? Remember that backup service I mentioned earlier thats only $5 per month? Not only is it cheap, it works automatically after a few minutes of setup time. It will actually backup your entire computer without any effort on your part! If you dont have time for that, I dont know what you have time for. |
