If you make your livelihood by using a computer, you ought to protect yourself against any computer disasters. If you were a taxi driver, you would take out car and public liability insurance. If you were an employer, you may take out plant and tools insurance. If you were a landlord you would take out property insurance and loss of income insurance.
However, what do you do if you toil on line? Well, when you work with computers, data is your most precious resource, but you cannot insure against losing it because you cannot prove that you ever had it. So, what can you do? The answer is that you need to have reliable backups and several of them.
The problem is that computers do not frequently break down so we are lulled into the false feeling of security that we can make backups tomorrow instead of right now. However, the longer that you work with IT, the more you comprehend that there are no warning signs when you are about to lose all your data, which may be your entire income stream.
For example, say you make web sites for a living and update them frequently so that the search engines find them interesting. What would occur if your hard drive crashed or if they were destroyed by a virus? You might say that you would download them from your Internet host and begin again, but that is not possible, because most HTML editors will not decompile a completed website.
That would mean that you could never update those web sites again, so they would get less and less interesting to the search engines, so your ranking would fall and your income would plunge. And why? Because you failed to insure your business by taking adequate backups. You failed to make proviso for data recovery in the event of data loss.
However, no matter how often you backup your data on physical media, you will always be facing a danger because anything physical, any device is prone to failure and deterioration. CD's do not last as long as we were promised. I have lost loads of work that I reckoned was safe on CD's and hard drives are apt to fail with no notice at all.
Even if you do overcome these issues of storage, what occurs if there is a fire or a thief really steals all your disks and computers? Your hardware would be insured but your livelihood, your data would be gone forever. All that hard effort. Your source of earnings. Gone. Forever.
There is another alternative and that is not to store your data on your computer, in your office or anywhere within a thousand miles of yourself. This is called cloud storage or cloud data storage. Microsoft calls it Sky Drive and offers 25 GB of free, password-protected, storage available from anywhere in the world. This kind of storage is the ultimate in safe storage offering the best value recovery planning for computer data.
However, what do you do if you toil on line? Well, when you work with computers, data is your most precious resource, but you cannot insure against losing it because you cannot prove that you ever had it. So, what can you do? The answer is that you need to have reliable backups and several of them.
The problem is that computers do not frequently break down so we are lulled into the false feeling of security that we can make backups tomorrow instead of right now. However, the longer that you work with IT, the more you comprehend that there are no warning signs when you are about to lose all your data, which may be your entire income stream.
For example, say you make web sites for a living and update them frequently so that the search engines find them interesting. What would occur if your hard drive crashed or if they were destroyed by a virus? You might say that you would download them from your Internet host and begin again, but that is not possible, because most HTML editors will not decompile a completed website.
That would mean that you could never update those web sites again, so they would get less and less interesting to the search engines, so your ranking would fall and your income would plunge. And why? Because you failed to insure your business by taking adequate backups. You failed to make proviso for data recovery in the event of data loss.
However, no matter how often you backup your data on physical media, you will always be facing a danger because anything physical, any device is prone to failure and deterioration. CD's do not last as long as we were promised. I have lost loads of work that I reckoned was safe on CD's and hard drives are apt to fail with no notice at all.
Even if you do overcome these issues of storage, what occurs if there is a fire or a thief really steals all your disks and computers? Your hardware would be insured but your livelihood, your data would be gone forever. All that hard effort. Your source of earnings. Gone. Forever.
There is another alternative and that is not to store your data on your computer, in your office or anywhere within a thousand miles of yourself. This is called cloud storage or cloud data storage. Microsoft calls it Sky Drive and offers 25 GB of free, password-protected, storage available from anywhere in the world. This kind of storage is the ultimate in safe storage offering the best value recovery planning for computer data.
About the Author:
Owen Jones, the author of this article, writes on many subjects, but is currently involved with researching the best virus protection software. If you have an interest in such software, please go over to our website now at Computer Antivirus Software
