Why You Should Back Up Your Hard Drive

Hard drive backup is one of the most important things you can do to ensure the security of your business’s information and data. Imagine losing your computer to fire, theft, or malfunction. If you don’t have an external hard drive backup, all of your information is gone in an instant. Here are our reasons why having additional copies of your data is so important.

1. You don’t know what you’ve got when it’s gone. One of the scariest parts of losing your data is that you might not know exactly what it is that you’ve lost. Unless you keep detailed records of everything you do on your system, it’s quite possible that you won’t even know something is missing until you need it, in which case you’re empty-handed. This can have serious consequences in the business world. Don’t let it happen to you.
2. The costs of lost data are extensive. When your hardware is stolen, damaged, or suffers a crash, you not only have to replace the device but if you don’t have a backup, you also have to pay for the restoration. There are some instances in which lost data can be restored, but this is a costly process and is often imperfect. If you have a hard copy or other existing records, these can be input manually back into your system, but it will be a time-consuming effort on the part of your employees.
3. You’re likely to get lackluster results for duplicated efforts. If your employees are tasked with duplicating their previous work that was lost, expect the second go-round to be of lower quality than the first. Your staff is now pressed for time because they still have the same amount of work expected of them but fewer hours in which to complete it, and they are unlikely to put the same level of care and concern into redoing their work as they did when they performed the task originally.

Avoid these serious problems by backing up a hard drive regularly and storing your backups off-site. This advice applies to data storage devices as well: don’t wait until you have only a single master copy of a CD or DVD with your necessary information on it. Get that data duplicated immediately to reduce the likelihood of losses.