When it comes to a misbehaving computer, take advantage of the moment and backup important data!
While there may be various reasons why a computer is misbehaving or acting funny, such as an infected computer or the start of a hard drive failure, I always tell clients that this is an opportune time to back up data if you don’t already have a process in place, especially before the situation gets worse.
I cannot tell you how many times I have had to replace a hard drive and the horror on a client’s face when they find out they have lost everything. I just can’t say it enough. Backup, backup, backup. And when I say backup, I’m mainly talking about all the content that did not come with your computer, such as pictures, music, video, and documents.
Personally, I try to use the 3-2-1 backup rule, which is basically keeping 3 copies of files on 2 different media types with 1 copy offsite. The offsite part of the rule used to be tricky, but online backups have made this much easier now.
In fact, I recently became a Carbonite customer, which is an online or ‘in the cloud’ solution. So far I’ve been extremely happy. I’m not trying to make this a Carbonite commercial. There are a few other solutions out there too, such as mozy, ibackup, and idrive. I mainly tried Carbonite because I hear them mentioned on many of the podcasts I listen to.
And if you’re not sure you need a backup solution, just think about what value you would put on your data. If you’re like me, I can’t when it comes to family videos and photographs.
So no matter what type of backup solution you decide to implement (external hard drive, flash drive, online, or a combination of all), don’t take the chance of losing data, especially when your computer starts giving signs that something is awry.