“Save and save often” used to be the computing mantra.  These days computers are so much more reliable, you don’t hear that phrase repeated as often.  Power outages, bugs and crashes could send people into a fury who had been working diligently on a file or document only to have time and productivity lost when the screen went black or blue.  Although not as often, it does still happen – though this post is about backups, I thought I’d remind you to save and save often…

You do back up your files, don’t you?  Hard drives fail.  They do.  I see it all the time.  There are instances when you do receive some kind of warning and you have time to create a final backup before replacing the failing hard drive.  Other times, there is no warning.

Time was, when it required a fairly good bit of misfortune to lose everything: precious photos of relatives who’ve passed, of your son or daughter’s first day of school, video of baby’s first steps, graduations, you get the point, misfortune like a house fire or a leaky roof, or flooded basement. In this digital world, all that is required is a hard drive failure.

You have to back up your files and data!  It is not only personal photos and video at stake.  I have experienced people who’ve lost hundreds of dollars in music purchases. We never really had much to worry about with albums, cassettes or CDs, but now with music and video downloads there is much at stake.  All of your email communication could also be lost.  Not to mention data files and documents.  With hours of labor involved, it is hard to attach a monetary cost to such items.

Put in perspective, spending $150 to $200 for an external USB backup hard drive is cheap insurance to protect your digital valuables.

Personally, I use a Synology server, which I mentioned in a previous post.  It was much more expensive than a simple external back up device, but still when compared to the value I would stand to lose, it really is cheap insurance.