Home Business

It's only a matter of time before you encounter a hard drive problem.  Have you made preparations so you don't lose all your data? If you experienced a hard drive crash right this moment, do you have a backup plan in place?

Unfortunately, many people only think to back up their computer data only after they run into a hard drive problem. Of course, by then it's too late. Make sure you don't get caught off guard.

Don’t delay in formulating a solid data backup strategy. Determine what data to back up, how often you'll back it up, and what method you’ll use to back it up. Think about what data is absolutely critical for you to operate your home business. This data should be backed up on a daily basis. This can include all your documents and financial information. You probably want to backup your emails and contact information as well.

Carefully examine every directory on your computer to see if you want to include it in your critical backup list. Try not to keep any username and password information on your computer, as it's not secure. It's better to keep that information written down and safely tucked away.

Next, think about the data that would be useful, but not essential for you to run your home business. This data can be backed up at one week intervals, or even longer. M of ost backup software programs these days have built-in reminders and most can automatically schedule backups while you sleep.

At the very least, backup your data every time you change your clock to match daylight savings time. That's still much better than having no backups at all.

Write down a list of all the software applications that you use. Gather the physical install discs for these programs together in a secure location. For any software that you downloaded from the Internet and which you don't have any install discs for, manually burn the software onto backup discs. Don't forget to include driver and install discs for items such as your printer or digital camera to your collection.

You can determine the procedure that you’ll use to backup your data based on the amount of data that you want to back up. If it fits onto a CD or DVD, you just need to burn one disc every time you run a backup and you're done.

If the data you want to back up spans multiple DVDs, then you might want to consider getting an external hard drive as a backup device in order to save yourself time and aggravation.

Of course, you might feel you need to back up everything on your hard drive, but in this case you would need massive storage space to constantly back up new data. If you do decide that all your data is critical, you might want to run two hard drives in parallel, so that if one drive fails, the other one still has all the same data.

Remember, any information that you have stored on your computer could disappear in a moment. If you want to avoid spending thousands of dollars to have a data retrieval firm comb through the remains of your crashed hard drive in an effort to extract any useful remaining data, then take a moment right now to formulate a data backup plan. When, not if, you do run into a hard drive problem in the future, you'll be so glad you did.