16 Nov 2008

by Dawn Clement
November 16, 2008

“What’s the safest way to protect your data?”

“The dog ate my homework” used to be a common excuse for students. These days, educators are more likely to hear “my hard drive crashed.” The sad part of the story is that, too often, it’s true! Losing data is a given when working with computers. Eventually, your computer’s hard drive will fail; a hard drive is merely a piece of machinery that will wear out. Once the hard drive goes, recovering your data becomes a difficult (sometimes impossible) task.

Of course, there are other ways to lose important data—a power failure (or spike) can result in the loss of whatever document you are currently working on, a computer virus can destroy random data, or the data can simply become corrupted. It all amounts to the same thing—data loss.

You might think you don’t have any irreplaceable data on your home computer—but you’d be wrong. Take a minute and really think about what’s on your hard drive. Do you use e-mail? Would you be able to recreate your address book from memory? How about your bookmarks? Do you really remember the URLs of your favorite Web sites? How about music? How many MP3s do you have on your hard drive? Are you prepared to lose the saved game that took you three months? How many digital photos do you have? The list goes on and on. You don’t realize how irreplaceable your data is until you’ve lost it.

Rule number one of computer use is “always back up your work.” At the very least, have a copy on your …

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