Backup... or wish you had!

Last week a friend of mine told me that their hard drive crashed and they lost all of the family photos that they had taken over the past several years.  One company told him they could try and retrieve the information from the hard drive for $3,000... but there were no guarantees how successful they would be.

That's a lot of money, especially considering how easy it is to back up the information on your computer.  I own a landscape architecture firm and for years now I have taken an external hard drive to the office every Friday.  We back up all the information on our server and I store the external hard drive in a safe at my house.  This way, at the very worst, we would lose a weeks worth of work if our hard drive crashed on a Friday.  I kept the back up at a seperate location in case of fire.  This system is better then nothing... but far from ideal.

A few months ago we decided to try Carbonite, an online company that backs up your information whenever you are not on the computer.  When your computer is idle, Carbonite automatically backs up new and changed files. You don’t have to do anything! When you’re using your computer, Carbonite goes to sleep so it will never slow down your computer or internet connection.  And  get this, it only costs about $50 per year!

We have already used our Carbonite account to retrieve some plans that I accidentally deleted from our system.   It was a really simple process.  I am going to set up an account for my photography business as well.  I have heard a lot of people say good things about Carbonite... and I have definately been impressed.  You might want to look into it for yourself.  After all, $50 seems like pretty cheap insurance.

I have no affilliation with this company... I just wanted to pass along what I found.

Ryan