I had the privilege of helping a customer with their Dell laptop and after some investigation I found that the hard drive was bad and it needed to be replaced. As it stood it was not a big deal, the hard drive was covered under Dell warranty so the new hard drive was free.
But what of the data?
The pictures and documents are now held hostage on this hard drive that is physically bad. This data is unrecoverable and the service to get data off of a broken hard drive can cost thousands.
You might wonder how to protect yourself from this fate and I can give you a definitive answer.
First and foremost you need an external hard drive that comes with software that automatically backs up your docs and pictures. The one that I use and recommend is the Seagate FreeAgent Desk 500GB External Hard Drive ($79). What makes me love this drive is the fact that it comes with a great software package that backs up my documents every night. This means that if my computer’s internal hard drive goes bad I only stand to lose 1 days worth of data at the most. Unless my external drive somehow goes bad at the same time as my internal drive.
This is where Mozy online backup service comes in. Mozy is a great service that runs on your computer and uploads your documents to a computer on the internet where they will be safe no matter what happens to your local computer. You may worry about the security of this process but you can feel safe that your data will be encrypted before it is transfered so none else can read it except for you. The best thing is that Mozy only costs about $5 a month for unlimited data.
Think about it for about $85 you can implement a very solid backup solution and you wont have to worry about your data being lost.
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