Importance of Good Backup Data
After five years of providing technical support for a variety of accounting packages, one thing I've found that is sure to bring tears to the person calling support is the question: "How recent was your last good data backup? "
Backup Data As Corruption Will Happen
It is absolutely critical that users understand that corruption happens, hard drives will fail, motherboards will short out, and mistakes will erase data. Good maintenance and technical skills may increase the time between errors, but in the end Murphy always wins and you will need your data backup.
Backup Data Solutions are Affordable
What is important to stress it that having a regular" data backup does not need to be painfully or expensive. Modern technology had brought very large hard drives, Zip and Jazz, DVD and CD burners, and tape data backup systems within the reach of even a modest budget. Even though the question of which of these items are appropriate for your data backup needs and budget will depend on your particular circumstances, but the overall need for data backup is not.
True Cost of Having No Backup Data
Almost as important as admiting it can happen to you, is recognizing the cost of data loss. Most people don't realize how much they have invested into the data on their hard drive. Forget about the obvious things like financial data (Receivables, Payables, and Tax Information), which we know would be disastrous to lose. Instead think about the man-hours re-installing the base software on your computer, reconfiguring your environment to suit your preferences again.
Losing your e-mail addresses, and Internet bookmarks. Without a full data backup, getting up and going again could easily cost you several days of productivity.. How much is your time worth to you.
On the other hand, occasional full data backups, combined with nightly backups of key data, will often turn several days of lost productivity and weeks of reorganizing into an hour of restoring your disk image, and key data that may have changed since the last full backup.
Daniel Jones is a contributor at Free-backup.info -- the home of the popular tool for windows online backup -- Back2zip. This article can be found at http://free-backup.info/why-do-i-need-to-backup-my-data-1.html
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