Often I am asked to provide old files to clients. They have lost the files or had a computer catastrophe that led them to call me in desperation asking, "Do you have that file?!" So far, the answer has always been yes. The reason is because of a) luck b) back ups.
You can’t do much about bad luck, but you can do something about back ups. There’s an old saying that you should only back up the data you don’t want to lose. Call me uptight, but in my case, that’s everything. I never want to lose any data because every little byte of data I create takes time. And time is money.
It’s just common sense. If it takes me 30 minutes to write this article, that’s 30 minutes I’d have to spend to write it again if my computer eats it and the Word files goes to the big data dumpster in the sky. If I’m rewriting an article, I’m not writing something else, which means lost income.
If you agree that data is worth actual cold hard cash, doesn’t it make sense to back it up? You have many options. For example, if you have a network, one easy thing to do is just back up your data folders to another computer. Along the same lines, it can be a good idea to store your data on a different physical drive in your computer. As I’ve noted in the past, my data is stored on my D drive, not my C drive. Since the C drive is almost invariably where Windows lives, that’s the most likely drive to die.
Removable storage is another option. Depending on the size of your drive, you may be able to back up data to Zip or Jaz drives. Personally, I’m a big fan of backing up to plain old CD-Rs. They are cheap, easy to store and last longer than media that is affected by magnetic fields like disks or tapes. You can burn a bunch of CDs and then put them in a safety deposit box at your bank. Your luck has to be really bad for your office to burn down the same time as your bank.
If you have vital data that changes often, you may want to do an archive backup to CD and then incremental backups using a faster or easier method. No matter what you do, back up regularly. Replacing lost data is expensive.