How to protect your critical data

No one can deny the importance of data. If you’ve had a virus attack, system crash, corruption, accidental deletion/format at the most crucial times, you probably realize the need of securing and protecting the data from any kind of disaster. Yet, how many of us actually do something to protect our data? Our data is always vulnerable and at risk at any given time. This is one of the lessons that we never learn from experience. Data backup is a practice that is hardly followed, even in the corporate world. Home users are always at a risk because they don’t know what to do about it.

With a little preparation, home users can protect their data. A small investment in time and money can prevent from huge loss. The idea is to backup your data and keep it redundant.

This is the last post of my data protection series. I shall go over some of the ways to protect your critical data. I am sure you will find it helpful.

So, in order to protect from data loss, the data should be redundant. Your most critical data should be stored in multiple locations. One way to achieve this to invest in a external hard drive and use to backup your critical data only. Another way is to use backup software and backup your data to a different storage device, or DVDs.

All of these methods are manual. Yes you can schedule backup jobs but if you are backing up on DVD then you should have an empty DVD ready at the time of data backup. So it needs a certain level of management, and home users are usually not very enthusiastic about performing data backups at regular intervals. They either forget about it or just procrastinate. That defeats the entire purpose of data protection.

A better way is to keep your data synchronized at another storage or location. This is also called data replication. Although robust replication solutions cost a lot but home users can set up simple replication. There is this tool called Allway Sync. It’s free and neat utility to synchronize your data between two hard drives, or even two computers in a network. I use it and I recommend it. Oh, did I mention it’s free!!

An addition to that, you can have copies of your important files like resume on the internet. Gmail rocks! Just email your important stuff to your gmail account. Buy a USB flash drive and keep your important data in it. Of course, you will have to keep it encrypted in order to prevent misuse.

Few precautionary steps and a savvy approach, you can significantly reduce the risk that exists without any protection. I learnt it the hard way. Don’t wait for the disaster to happen to implement data protection. It would be too late then.