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What would do if your computer crashed…today?  What information would you lose?  DoItYourself.com claims ten percent of the world’s computers crash daily.  The scarier number is twenty-two percent of computer users have no backup for their data.

Could you imagine losing every single picture you have stored on your hard drive?  Or all the music you bought from iTunes?  The costs could be outrageous: emotionally and financially.  I’m very fortunate that my best friend is a computer guy who drills me on this.  I used to burn DVDs of all my pictures and music every six months.

After the last time of doing this, I was tired of the effort.  I bought an external hard drive and cloned the one in my PC.  Less than a month later, I became one of the ten percent to lose my computer.  It just stopped working, and not one piece of info could be recovered.

I lost 24 hours.  That is the time it took me to buy a new drive, install it and transfer all my info.  Whew!  Many businesses actually go bankrupt after losing all of their clients’ data.  I don’t even want to imagine the regret of losing all of my pictures.

What can we do?  Cheapest solution: burn DVDs of the files you care about the most, and do it on a regular basis.  Or you can buy a personal website and store the data in a server.  For a more expensive fix, you can invest in an external hard drive and save files to it.  Some people have theirs setup to automatically copy files to their computer and to the drive.

I have been using my external drive to backup my files every few months and then place the drive in my firesafe.  Another layer of security is to have all of my pictures and important files saved onto my business laptop.  This creates a tri-fecta of data backup.

For a more expensive solution, run multiple hard-drives in your computer.  Some people have clone drives, and if one fails, the other kicks in automatically.

What do you do to protect your data?