Paid to Play

When asked what’s the single most important thing they can do for their business, most people will give any of a number of different answers. Most will be very important, but in my opinion, nothing is more critical than making sure your computer is backed up!

A current backup of your computer will be a lifesaver when (note I didn’t say if) your hard drive fails. Hard drives can run for years with no problems, but sooner or later they all fail.

I know of at least one Internet entrepreneur who recently had a hard drive crash and lost almost a week of time rebuilding his business data. The irony is that he’s a former computer professional who’s been in the business well over 20 years and should know better.

We all get complacent. I’m as guilty as the next person, but I’m sufficiently paranoid that I keep searching for good automatic backup methods. I’m investigating various backup methods including online backups and external hard drives.

Each of these requires software to actually transfer the files to the storage media. Finding the right combination is a challenge, but well worth the effort.

Hard drives are extremely cheap these days. The excuse that backing up takes too much disk space is no longer valid. For around $100 you can get external hard drives of 320MB or larger. The price per gigabyte of storage continues to drop and available drives have up to 1 terabyte (that’s 1,000 GB!) of capacity for less than $200.

Software for backups is readily available and fairly inexpensive, as well. Many hard drives come with backup software so there’s no additional cost beyond the cost of the drive.

Whichever software and media solution you choose, do yourself a huge favor and test it thoroughly before you assume it’s working. Backup your system, then restore the files from the backup, if possible. At least verify that the files on the backup media are valid. There’s nothing quite so depressing as to think you’re backed up only to find that the backup is no good.