Let’s face it; we store our entire digital lives on our computers. Gone are the days of using 35mm film to capture life’s moments – now we point, shoot, upload, copy and ultimately store those moments in time on our computer (can you even remember the last time you actually printed out a photo?!). Alongside our photos are thousands of hours of our favorite tunes, videos that have been collected over the years and don’t forget your college essay’s (or your children’s homework assignments). All of these files create our digital collection of personal items that if we were to lose, would create sheer pandemonium and of course, probably make you cry.
Here’s a question, where do you keep your Social Security card? What about your birth certificate? If you like to keep a stash o’ cash, where do you have that?

Exactly.

You don’t leave it out, unprotected (if you do, well I am sorry to hear that, but maybe you want to re-think where you keep some of the most important documents one could ever posses!). Chances are, you have a safe, a safe-deposit box at a bank, or some other ‘vault’ to store these items. These items are protected from fire, theft or any other form of destruction; but what about your digital collection of personal items?
You know where I am going with this.

Chances are you haven’t backed up anything. There’s a device in your computer called a hard drive. This is the device that holds all of your valuable information. This device is like a ticking time bomb, just sitting there, spinning away, creating all sorts of heat and noise until one day ‘click click – click click – click click’ and NOTHING! It either refuses to power on, or it spins up but makes god-awful clicking sounds (or some other sounds) and your computer doesn’t turn on and basically, everything that was stored on it is gone, damaged, or incredibly difficult to recover.
How do you avoid this conundrum?

Back up your data, silly!

It really isn’t that difficult, nor is it expensive! There are myriad of free programs/apps out there that will do the job and all you need is an external hard drive which can be purchased very inexpensively, or a large capacity USB stick. The years of photos, music, documents and other data truly are priceless in this digital world, so why risk losing them for good?

If you’re on a Mac and you aren’t using Time Machine, well then, you are just silly!

Here at Cross Island Computers, we can easily ensure that all of the data on your personal PC, Mac or server is properly backed up through a multitude of methods and programs. It doesn’t matter if you are a residential user with one or 5 computers that you want backed up; or if you’re a small business with servers, and workstations that need to be backed-up – we can help!

So before you risk losing all of your personal digital collection, please let us help make sure your data is safe and you can get it back in the event of complete catastrophe!