Learning the Hard Way

Over the years I've watched various clients experience hard drive failure complicated by lack of data backup. Its an ugly thing to watch as a business owner discovers that his most valuable assett, his client records, are gone.

To make sure that doesn't happen to me, I backup everything to an external drive that can plug into any USB port on any other computer. Unfortunately, I've also given in to the temptation to "do it tomorrow."

This afternoon, while reaching for the phone, I spilled half a cup of coffee into the keyboard of my laptop, which promptly stopped working. I'm embarrassed to admit that my most recent backup was two weeks ago.

I spent the afternoon learning about data recovery, and thanks to my new friends at a local computer repair facility I have all of the files I've been working on this week restored to my external drive and accessible from older computer I keep for emergencies.

I was lucky. This could have been ugly. I'm implementing a daily backup regimen.

How about you? Are you backing up daily? Weekly? Whenever you think what you're working on is important? Whenever you have the time?

Got any hard drive failure horror stories to share?

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