Photo by CC user CyberHades on Flickr.
Your data is one of your most valuable possessions. If you lose it for one reason or another, it will cost you much time and effort to get it back. Recreating it might also cost you in terms of money and stress – if it can be recreated at all. Since your data is essentially an investment, you need to take measures to ensure that it is protected and take steps to ensure that you don’t lose it.
What to Do If You Lose It
There are many reasons why you may lose data. There are failures with hardware, bugs in software, humans make errors and natural disasters occur. All of these can lead to data loss. Once your data is lost, you will need to call in professionals, like one of the Toronto hard drive recovery services. This isn’t really something that you should try to undertake yourself due to the risk of making the situation worse.
Backing Up
You need to be making backups of your photos, videos, documents and other files on both your cloud service and an external hard drive. You will be glad for the redundancy should something happen to your data. If this seems like it is just too much effort, there is also another solution. Amazon and Seagate have joined together to assist you with that. They are launching a new external hard drive that is portable. This drive will assist you by backing up your data both locally and to Amazon simultaneously. And honestly, compared to the thousands of hours you spent collecting all of the data on your computer, isn’t it worth taking a few minutes to back it up?
USB Flash Drives
When it comes to backing up your files, many people rely on USB flash drives. These little gadgets are highly favored due to them not having any moving parts inside them and because of this, they are much tougher than your traditional hard drive. With that being said, they will not last forever. They have a lifespan that is limited and you can only write over the data so many times before the drive will just fail. They are also incredibly easy to lose or be stolen because of their small size. Also, if you forget and leave one in your pocket, the washing machine will kill it.
The Cloud
Cloud computing is becoming more and more the default. Storing your data here does have its advantages as well as a few drawbacks. Some of the advantages are that it is affordable and gives you access from nearly anywhere and nearly any time. This is also a great way to store your data off-site so that it will be safe in the event of a disaster. Also, backing up to the cloud is simple and it can even be automated. However, one of the drawbacks is that you need to be connected to the internet to access your data – which poses issues if you happen to be on a plane trying to get your work done before the big meeting that you are flying to.
A Closer Look
We glossed over some of the reasons for data loss earlier, but let’s break it down a bit. Modern hardware has a tendency to be quite reliable. That doesn’t mean that it won’t break spontaneously. Your most important part of the hardware when it comes to data storage is your hard disk. This piece of equipment depends on tiny magnetic fields that have to remain intact in a world that is filled with electromagnetic noise.
When it comes to modern software, reliability isn’t really a thing. A program that is rock solid is the exception as opposed to being the rule. Humans can be quite unreliable too. We make mistakes and there are also evil people out there who will be malicious and destroy their own or other peoples’ data on purpose. Some people might not consider mother nature to be an evil entity, but she can wreak havoc even on clear days. Put all of this together and you will begin to see that having data is a risky thing.
The bottom line is that backups are a way that you can protect the investment that is your data. If you have several copies of your data – known as redundancy – it won’t matter so much if one copy is damaged or becomes inaccessible.