How many people out there have insurance? Personal health cover? Asset protection?

What about something to protect the big D — your DATA!

It’s very easy to see the value in protecting your finances, your home and your health but let me tell you, if you ever lose what you have stored on your computer… GUARANTEED you will be a distraught mess.

Well this is what I had to experience recently and I now know that the pain is absolutely not worth feeling again. This is why I am giving you all the warning before you have to endure the grief that I have.

I am a fair ‘backerup-er-er’ but this one caught me off guard. Just six months since my last back up and as I was moving folder from one to another I deleted. No point explaining the details. To cut a long story short, I PERMANENTLY deleted some of my partner’s very important business folders!

The realisation hit me like a brick to the guts. I had the old hand on the head, mouth gaping approach that made me look like I had just seen a murder occur. I had! A murder of the last year of my life’s work!

Now… I can safely say that since the trauma I have indeed recovered, but will forever be scarred by the experience. I am just glad that with through my mistake I can offer some advice to you all to make sure this NEVER HAPPENS!

BACK UP!

‘Back up’ is not a dance move from a 90s hip hop video. This is serious stuff man. We’re in the 21st century now so some sort of back up system is a must!

So how do you back up? There are simple solutions…

EXTERNAL BACK UP

There are plenty of external back up drives out there that you can copy your data to on a somewhat regular basis (depending on how quickly your data builds). This is easy, fairly inexpensive considering the size of back up hard drives these days and ensures you data is still somewhere if not on your computer anymore.

ONLINE BACK UP

Local backup is an essential part of securing your data against disaster, but with internet so easily accessible and speedy, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t back up on the cloud (you can always do both and be extra safe!).

Some options for online back up are:

– CrashPlan
– Mozy
– Dropbox
– JungleDisc
– Carbonite

I use Dropbox and find it works great for what I need. Unfortunately for me I was in the process of moving the folder to the Dropbox when all hell broke loose. Now, I can assure you, it is safely inside my Dropbox and backed up externally as well.

Dropbox is free for up to 2GB and as well as backing up, allows you to access your files from any device — desktop, laptop, ipad and even iphone. Can be very handy when you need to remember something you have saved in a file at home.

WHAT TO DO IF YOUR FILES DO GET DELETED PERMANENTLY!

Firstly, do not panic. There is still hope for you yet.

What I discovered is that there are tools out there to recover deleted or lost files. I found one that was totally free called NTFS Undelete – https://ntfsundelete.com/ – and it was my saviour. With a quick scan I was given a heap of files to try and locate my lost data. And there they were – my beautiful and precious files deep inside ‘Lost folder #5168’.

The whole experience was not without its inconvenience. I still had to endure the horror, the anger, the grief, and the desperation. But I came out fairly unscathed and unaffected, living to tell the story and heed the warning to other unprepared computer users.

So what have we learnt here?

None of us want to be a Carrie Bradshaw rushing their precious laptop off to the computer thanks to a little man with crosses over his eyes and tongue poking out of his mouth. You just know you’re not going to get good news. She learnt the hard way but you don’t have to! So back it up baby!