If you make your money by using a computer, you ought to protect yourself against all 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 equipment insurance. If you were a landlord you would take out property insurance and loss of earnings insurance.
But what do you do if you work on line? Well, when you work with computers, data is your most valuable 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 have to have dependable backups and a number of of them.
The difficulty is that computers do not often break down so we are lulled into the false feeling of security that we can take backups tomorrow instead of right now. However, the longer that you work with IT, the more you comprehend that there are no warning signs if you are about to lose all your data, which might be your entire income stream.
For example, say you make web sites for a living and update them regularly so that the search engines find them interesting. What would happen if your hard drive crashed or if they were destroyed by a virus? You may say that you would download them from your Net host and begin again, but that is not feasible, because most HTML editors will not decompile a completed web site.
That would mean that you could never update those web sites again, so they would become less and less interesting to the search engines, so your ranking would fall and your earnings 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 frequently you backup your data on physical media, you will always be running a danger because anything physical, any device is subject to failure and deterioration. CD’s do not last as long as we were promised. I have lost loads of work that I thought was safe on CD’s and hard drives are prone to fail with no notice whatsoever.
Even if you do conquer these problems 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 source of revenue, your data would be gone forever. All that hard work. Your source of income. Gone. Forever.
There is another alternative and that is not to hold 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 best in secure storage providing the best value recovery planning for computer data.
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