Do You Backup Your Computer Files?

Do you backup your computer files?

I can tell you from personal experience that waiting until you have a major mishap, like a computer crash, is NOT the time to decide that you need to start backing up your files! This is one area of your business that you need to be diligent in. Again I can tell you from personal experience what a mess it is to have your computer crash and not be backing up your files.

A couple years ago I had a major virus on my computer. After a couple days of it being worked on by a couple friends – one of them a computer repair guy – they couldn’t do anything except restore everything back to factory settings. In other words my computer had to be completely wiped out. I was starting with a blank slate!

No big deal right? Just recover all the lost files from the backups I had been doing. Wrong! It’s embarrassing to admit that two years into my business I hadn’t been backing my files up at all. While that could have been a huge mess, a catastrophe, I was lucky that the friends working on my computer were able to salvage about 90% of my files before they had to wipe it out.

That was definitely a hard lesson to learn but probably one of the most valuable lessons I could have ever learned. As soon as my computer was back up and running I immediately went and signed up for Mozy Home Backup. At $4.95 a month there was no reason I shouldn’t have been using their software before! One thing I learned during those two days, of no computer and the uncertainty of whether I was going to lose all my files or not, was that no price can be put on doing regular backups!

After that incident I had a few people ask why I hadn’t been doing backups. My reasoning was that it seemed complicated or difficult to me and I never thought I really had any reason to backup. Let me just say that if you own a computer and surf the internet – you need to be backing up your files! And it’s certainly not hard to do them.  There are a few different options. First we’ll look at backup software programs and then online backup programs.

Backup Software Programs

Norton. You’ve probably heard of them and know them for their antivirus software. However they do also make backup software programs. Norton Ghost 14.0 is one. It allows you to back up specific folders or your entire hard drive. Another one is Norton Save & Restore 2.0.

Online Backup Programs

Online backup programs are a little different in that your data is being sent to a secure server online. You can find both free and paid services. A few different online backup programs are:

Mozy – $4.95 for unlimited data or free up to 2GB. As I mentioned above I signed up for Mozy. Not only are they super inexpensive but they make backing up your files super easy. It was a matter of downloading the software onto my computer, configuring it to when I wanted it to automatically back up my files and that was it! My files are backed up at the time I specified every single day now. There’s nothing I have to do on my end besides pay the monthly invoice and even that’s basically out of my hands as it’s set up on automatic payment.

Carbonite – $49.95 a year for unlimited data backup. I don’t have much more information about them other than the price they charge per year.

When it comes to backup software and whether to use an online option or not it’s entirely a personal preference what will work best for you. All programs will offer something different. One positive about using an online program like Mozy is that in cyberspace your files can’t be stolen.

I hope after hearing my personal story that if you aren’t already backing up your files you’ll start right NOW! Don’t say it won’t happen to you because I thought the same thing. In fact it’s probably not a matter of if you’ll have a computer crash but when. Be prepared and start backing up your files today.