The threat of data loss exists with almost every click of your mouse. Life in the online world can be dangerous. Smart companies will do whatever it takes to minimize that risk.

Have you ever lost all the data on a floppy disk and had to redo an entire afternoon’s work? Perhaps you have rendered a music or game CD unusable due to a small scratch? Perhaps you’ve experienced a complete hard drive crash resulting in gigabytes of data lost and months, even YEARS of wasted effort.

The “worst case scenario” happened to me a few years ago. I received a call from a friend informing me that my house had been burglarized and thieves had not only stolen the electronic devices in the living room, but also taken the computers from the house. I learned the hard way that data backup is something that all computer users who have important data on their hard drive cannot live without. Whether you simply purchase an external drive that you can connect via USB or Firewire, or sign up for a secure off-site data backup, be sure to take the necessary steps to ensure your data is safe and sound, even if the worst happens to your computer hardware.

It doesn’t hit you right away when you no longer have access to your data. The first thing that comes to mind is the expensive hardware that was used to build their machine. Maybe you had a nice flat screen monitor or a state-of-the-art video card to play the latest games. While it can be very disappointing to lose expensive tech products like these, it still doesn’t compare to losing those zeros and a few burns on each user’s hard drive. Hardware can almost always be replaced, even at no cost to you if you have insurance, but lost data is gone forever. There is no way to recover data that you have not backed up if you lose the original media on which it was stored.

In my case, I wasn’t using secure off-site data backup, nor any kind of backup for that matter. My backup was about six months old and on a tape drive in my closet. When those crooks left with my machine, they left not only with a great gaming rig, but also my entire web design portfolio, numerous custom versions of my resume, THOUSANDS of MP3 files that I had ripped from CDs (many of which had lost the original CD for), Microsoft Money files and thousands of digital photographs impossible to replace.

Take a moment and think about all the important digital files that you have on your computer and ask yourself if it is worth investing a little of your time and money in an online remote backup solution to make sure that the data is available to you throughout. life.

Your DATA is your LIFE. Protect it!