The Value and Importance of Regular Computer Backups

Consider this scenario: you go away for a few weeks on vacation and take a few hundred photos. You return home, and move all of the photos off of your camera's SD card onto your computer to free up the room on the SD card for future photos. Your plan is to go through all of those photos, eventually, and pick out and clean up the gems. But in the meantime - which we all know is something like weeks or months - disaster strikes, your computer's hard drive crashes and you not only lose all of your data, but all of your photos as well.

This is but one reason why you need to ensure that your computers are all backed up, and regularly.

Now think about other scenarios where the data on your computer could be damaged or completely lost:

Your home is robbed and your computer is stolen
Your laptop is stolen while on travel
Your house is damaged in a natural disaster. Examples: earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, etc.
Your house is damaged by fire
Your computer is damaged by a virus or malware and/or your data is stolen
Are you worried yet enough to do something about ensuring your computer's backups are up to date?

Hopefully the answer is a resounding yes!

So what's the solution?

First of all, don't fall into the trap that you only need to worry about backing up your computer to an external hard drive or other device external to your computer. If that device also lives in your house, then you are not fully protected.

The ultimate solution is to back up your data to somewhere outside of your house, preferably in another city altogether. And no, this does not mean to a friend's computer which lives in his house. Luckily, we live in an age of affordable cloud-based services and online backup is a reality starting at as little as $5 per month.

This industry is actually chock-full of competitors, which is a main factor in why the prices are so low. Some of the services charge based on the amount of data you're backing up, but most do periodic incremental backups.

We strongly recommend Backblaze for a number of reasons: a flat rate of $5/month regardless of how much data you back up, continuous backups, and you can supply a password or passphrase to encrypt all of your data before it is sent to their servers.

Even if you choose not to go with Backblaze, choose some service as soon as possible and begin protecting your important data.

Khalid Hosein is a blogger, computer consultant and tech geek who runs gadget blog Gizmos for Geeks, where you can find the latest in gadget and technology news, insights, howtos and much more. Visit Gizmos for Geeks to see more of his must-have, daily-use tech products list that will give your life and productivity an instant boost once you start using them

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