The Importance of Backups

For the second time in a short time, my MacBook's hard drive died.

The last time this happened, I lost three months' worth of work. That hit me bad. This time, I lost just one day's worth of work because I hadn't backed up the day before. That was a bummer, but less of a bummer than the previous failure.

Backups are so important that it can't be emphasised enough.

The most basic way of backing up is to make sure you just save your files in more than one place. You're saving a Word document or a project? Save it to your Hard Drive but save it to your Memory Key as well. This isn't a very good way, but at least you have a backup!

Better still is to schedule a backup to an external USB Hard Drive or even online. Just get another copy on another medium and, preferably, as far away from your primary computer as possible. Saving it twice to the same Hard Drive is not going to do anybody any good if the hard drive itself fails.

The feeling of loss when weeks, months or years worth of work goes down the pan is really gut wrenching, and if you need that work for completion within a tight deadline, then a backup is the only way to go.

If you don't have a tape drive or an external drive, you can take advantage of some online backup solutions. Some charge while others will offer you tonnes of space for free. If you're with BT, for example, you get 5Gb of backup space in their online vault (I'm looking at using this with my Mac since I've got it and I hate paying for the same service twice across vendors)*.

Basically, hunt, shop, Google, but get a safety net before it is too late. You can replace a Hard Drive, but you can't replace your data and trust me, no matter how hard you try, you will never be able to imagine the feeling you'd have at the loss of your data until you experience the loss of your data... And you don't want to feel that.


* I quite like the idea from MediaMax which gives you 25Gb free but charges you a nominal amount to download your backup (something which you shouldn't have to do if everything goes well!)