Its been a tough month all round and unfortunately internet marketing took very much a back seat!
As with many people, we are in the depths of winter, and for my wife and I, that means lots of snow and temperatures well below zero.
We chose to move house a couple of weeks ago just to add a little bit of spice to things.
How crazy is that?
We moved, computer carefully moved by hand and put gently into its new position.
My payback for all this loving care was first my Windows boot-up going into a continuous loop despite all my efforts to fix it.
Long story short, I had to restore Windows thereby wiping the hard disk.
How sad is that?
Unhappy, but I was still quite confident as I had most of my files backed up to an external hard disk and to online computer backup.
Backup online is very extensive and has, in my case, been backing up for a long time. It also takes a long time to restore if you want to restore all your files.
Anyway, this was steadily restoring when the hard disk failed completely! I have to say that my wife said the computer was very noisy but I suppose if you are living with it you probably don’t take too much notice.
So, what to do now – new computer, take computer to a local repair shop or replace the hard disk?
Having already lost a lot of time from an internet marketing point of view I decided to replace the hard disk myself so I did visit the local computer shop but only to buy a hard disk.
I managed to replace the hard disk myself (thank you Youtube), which was indeed a new experience, and all went well. Back to square one and starting backup all over again.
What is the point of this post you may be asking.
The point is to ask you “When was the last time you backed up the important files on your computer?”
Was this some time ago when you heard something similar to this story?
It is a fact of life that hard disks will fail.
My recent research showed that hard drives will fail anytime after 4 – 6 years. My hard disk was just about 4 years old.
It is not a case of maybe but more a case of when your hard drive will fail. Of course, a particularly nasty virus could also cause hard disk failure at any time.
I have had the BSOD (Blue Screen Of Death) on two separate computers in the past and I learned the lessons the hard way.
It set me back months!
As I mentioned earlier, I have an external hard disk, which I can access very quickly, and I backup online also.
The purpose of this post is to say to you “Don’t think this could never happen to me”. It will, and it hurts!
If you are running an online business, hard disk backup is essential.
How can I do this you may be asking.
One of my earlier posts was about backing up your WordPress blog and now, much more important, I am discussing backing up your essential files.
As I mentioned, I have an external hard drive and I use it both for freeing up space on my C:\ drive and also for back up.
However, what happens if you have a fire or something equally unpleasant at your house? Problem.
Online back up is the answer to this.
I use Carbonite and I have had good support from them. This costs me $59 a year (about 15c /day) and the backup just quietly looks after itself in the background.
If you Google “online backup” you will find others
External hard disks are becoming cheaper every day, in fact a member of my family recently bought one of 1 Terabyte (1024 gigabytes!) for around $35 although I have to say it was on offer at the time.
So, how smart am I? Not as smart as I thought! I did not keep my bookmarks backup up to date and neither did I backup my passwords (kept meaning to) so now I am slowly getting my passwords from my gmail etc as I need to find them.
Lesson learned.
I have also just looked at some software that takes an image of your hard disk but I am still a bit confused about this so more research is needed
To sum up:
Backup in as many ways as you feel you need to. For the sake of much less than $100 a year you can have peace of mind, and some extra flexibility with your computer.
You may need that back up tomorrow!
