Remember: Prevention is Always Better than Cure
No we’re not talking about being poorly – we’re talking about data retrieval. You alone know the value of your own data, and if you’re eager to ensure it stays safe from harm, you should focus on prevention at all times.
What would you do if you lost some or all of the data that is held on your computer(s), hard drive(s) and various other storage media? If you run a business such a loss could be devastating. Even if you could get the data back via a company that specialises in data retrieval, your business might suffer in the meantime. Would you feel secure in using a business that had lost some or all of your data?
Even if you don’t run a business and the data you lose access to is of a personal nature, it can still have a profound effect on your life. Imagine losing the information you need to complete a tax return – ouch. Losing hundreds if not thousands of family photos would arguably be a lot worse.
This is where prevention comes in. It’s certainly good to know you can rely on an expert service to retrieve your data for you. However doesn’t it make sense to think about preventing this situation from occurring in the first place? After all, it only takes a tiny amount of imagination to think of what would happen if all your data disappeared and you didn’t have a single copy to fall back on. It might be hard to think of all the problems this would create, but it would be troublesome to say the least.
The problem is that many people see this prevention idea as something they’ll do tomorrow. My advice is – get it off your procrastination list now. It doesn’t have to take that long to make a copy of everything. Ideally you want to focus on getting a copy you can gain access to from any point at all, rather than accessing it from a specific computer. This means storing it in the cloud, and there are plenty of free and paid for services you can fall back on for this purpose. Generally speaking the free ones come with limited storage, but even if you have to pay to store a lot of data the payments are very small for each month you use it. You have to think of the potential cost of losing that data to see just how cheap a method this is.
So you see, while the old adage ‘prevention is better than cure’ is a familiar one, it couldn’t be more right in this situation. It might take just a couple of hours – maybe less, depending on the amount of data you have – to make a copy of everything to store safely elsewhere. Isn’t your data worth devoting that amount of time to? If it is, you know what to do as soon as you finish reading this. Take good care of your information now.