For years we have preached about making routine tape backups of your system, so that when (sure go ahead and substitute "if" at this point if it makes you feel better) the grim hard disk reaper comes clicking at your system, you'll have some sort of chance of recovering your irreplaceable data.
We've written horror stories of customers spending thousands of dollars to recover their data. Of businesses being shut down for days and weeks. You've read the stories of the gigantic losses along the Gulf Coast this past year.
We have been seeing a lot more cases where personal home computers have had the HD crash and irreplaceable data has been lost. Family photos, Music, Financial data.
And guess what? Eight out of ten of you still have NO backup. When asked, most of you cite one of the following three reasons:
- 1. It costs too much, since I don't use the tape drive for anything else,
- 2. It takes too much time and hassle messing with tapes, and
- 3. I used to, but I got out of the habit.
So we're going to change. No more talking tape drives. (Don't listen you business customers, who change your tapes daily)
In the past there has been a cost barrier to backing up data, but today you can backup your data in most cases with the software and hardware you have now. If you have a CD-RW drive and Windows XP you can backup your files to CD. To make the backup easier you can backup to a DVD-RW drive or a removable HD.
Windows Backup has limited options. A stand-alone program can make backing up you data easer. One good choice is Roxio Backup MyPC which is part of Media Creator 8. Another good choice, especially to backup the whole drive and not just files is Acronis True Image 9.0.
Our recommended best solution is using one of the above backup packages with a removable hard disk to do a full system backup. This can be done for $275 for a 80GB removable Hard disk, Acronis True Image software and labor to install and setup, with our current monthly special. Other sizes, up to 500GB are available. Backups can be run automatically or with the click of a button.
We just want to make sure you are backing up your data because we do not like telling people that there data has been lost and the only option to retrieve the data is to spend $800 or more to send the hard disk to a data recovery company.