Do You Have a Backup Plan?

Categories: End Users Information

A few months ago I received a phone call from a county whose computer would not start. After troubleshooting the issue, it was determined the computer hard drive, the “brain of the computer” had become corrupted and there was nothing we could do to recover the data. The next question I asked was if the user had a backup of her computer and if her computer was backed up often. What a relief it was when her response was “Yes”, it backs up at least once a week.

While a situations of bad hard drives are rare, they happen. In this case, I was able to quickly recover files to a temporary computer, leave a temporary computer with them, re-set up the computer (on campus) and return them to full functionality within just a couple days. Sadly, this is not always the case and many users do not have a backup plan for their computers. If a computer doesn’t have regular backup or a backup at all, the best case scenario is the user not having a computer for several weeks and upon return, a jumble of files that to sort through. Worst case scenario is permanent loss.

To help prevent the worst case scenario, make sure you have a backup plan. One way to backup up your computer is on an external hard drive. The cost of 1TB External Drives are only about $80, a low expense when talking about years of work and information saved on your computer. Other options include cloud backups such as Carbonite or CrashPlan which for a monthly cost, can maintain a backup of your computer and allows full restore in a very short amount of time. At a very minimum (or in addition to an external drive/cloud backup) the use of tools such as Dropbox, OneDrive and Google Drive are available to save documents or copies to.

So, please, consider a backup plan for your computer. If you ever have a question, never hesitate to call your support specialist. We are more than happy to assist you in finding an option that will work best for you or your office as well as get your backup set up.

Finally, contact your specialist if you would like to confirm that your backup is working. We would much rather have you call to ask if your backup is working then discover months later when we are faced with a failed hard drive.