The Day That The World Disappeared

Every day as a society we become more and more reliant on technology.  A few weeks ago I was reading a blog post where the author posed the question of what you would do if the Internet suddenly disappeared. The comments to this post were very telling with people talking about how they would lose friends, memories and even entire businesses! The truth is that so much of our lives are inter-weaved with this digital world that we don’t even need the unlikely disappearance of the Internet for disaster to strike…

What if you woke up one day to find that your entire computer was wiped clean? Every last bit of data gone with a virus, or maybe your laptop gets stolen or perhaps there is a fire that destroys your PC. There are so many ways that you can lose your data it is unreal and the implications can be huge. This isn’t some far out disaster scenario it happens to people every day of the week and you will find there are generally two types of people in this situation…

Typically there is the type of person who will get angry, upset and desperately try anything to get their data back before realising there is nothing they can do. It can take more time and money than you’d imagine to get back songs and software but it’s the things that you can never get back like those photos from a family holiday that will really hurt…

And then you have the type of person who takes it all in their stride and perhaps even sits back with a slight grin. Sure it’s still annoying but there is one major difference; this person kept backups!

Now if you are anything like me you have learned this lesson the hard way and are already keeping more backups than you can count on one hand. Unfortunately the majority of people don’t even think about backing things up until they find themselves in the scenario I described above and trust me when I say that it’s simply no fun! Take a moment to sit back and think about how much stuff you keep on your computer. If there is even one thing that you wouldn’t like to lose then you need to come up with a backup plan and fast.

Probably the quickest way to start right now if you’ve never backed up is by reading the short report from IT Arsenal called Backup Informer. I was given a review copy the other day from it’s author and it is not only informative but to the point and contains charts that make it all easy to understand even if you aren’t the most tech savvy person in the world.

As somebody that has had to struggle through the loss of thousands of files up in the past; I can say without a shadow of doubt that you need to back things up whether you read this report or not. The most important thing is that you take action straight away.  The solutions he suggest are all free or low cost and when you find yourself needing them their value is always priceless!