Virtual House Fire

Several months ago the processor on our computer went bad. The computer had lived a good life and was in need of being replaced anyway so then I finally had a good reason. I ordered the parts to build the new computer, but when I removed the hard drives I placed one of them on the desk with the intent of adding it to the new computer later. This was the drive that had all of our pictures and music on it. I am talking thousands of songs and tens of thousands of pictures! Then a magnet was accidentally set on top of the drive.

The drive was quite a mess. To make a long story short I was sort of able to recover most of the pictures and luckily I had all of the music and most of the pictures backed up elsewhere. I suppose we may never know for sure how much was lost. It was like a virtual house fire. One of the things that people fear most with a house fire, other than the loss of life, is losing those irreplacable things like family pictures.

The digital age we live in comes with pluses and minuses. The negative thing is that rather than taking a rare fire or flood to destroy 10 years of family memories it can take one simple little magnet. The advantage is that it is easy to have multiple copies of these digital items like music, pictures and documents. But of course you have to take the time to make sure you actually back them up. After lots of searching I think I have found a pretty good and inexpensive solution. Its called iDrive. You install a small program to your computer, configure the settings and it backs up all of your files, and this part is important, to an off site location! You aren't just backing up files to another hard drive in your house, which is better than nothing, but still vulnerable to theft and fires, but you are backing up to a secure server located somewhere else. It uses 128 bit encryption both in trasmitting the data and in storage, you can access the backup from any computer with an internet connection and you can have 2 GB of storage for free! If you need more than that, it is less than $5 per month. A great deal if you ask me.

Remember it is not a question of if your hard drive fails it is just a matter of when. Keep in mind that most hard drives have a life of 2 to 5 years at the most. Please, please, please take my advice and make sure that you have some kind of backup system, it will save you a lot of frustration and heartache later on.