Take the necessary steps to protect your digital assets. A few simple measures and a few critical minutes can make the difference between happiness and tragedy. 

Every hard drive will eventually stop working; at some point, you’ll be facing a possible loss of valuable business or personal data. Having up-to-date backups of all of your important data is the way to protect yourself from such a loss. 

Use this three-step process: 

• Do backups regularly. It’s best to establish at least a weekly schedule. Daily backups are best. 

• Test your backups periodically. Because data can get corrupted or backed up incorrectly, a monthly quality check of your backups should give you peace of mind. 

• Store your backups away from your computer. Keep them a safe distance from the original storage so that a large-scale disaster doesn’t damage everything. An online storage company such as Netaspects or Livevault is another option. 

Recovery Without Backups

Can data be recovered from a crashed drive if you don’t have backup files? Yes; the way you organize the data on your computer can have a significant effect on the likelihood of data recovery. A few simple steps can make it easier for data recovery experts to find your precious data once it’s gone missing. 

• Make multiple copies of critical files and put them into different folders. This will increase the likelihood of data recovery experts being able to recover one of those copies. 

• Put all of your most valuable data in the same folder. 

• Take advantage of the disk defragmenter on your computer. “Defragging” physically reorganizes the contents of the disk in order to store the ¬pieces of each file close together. Having a majority of the file located in the same place on the disk helps recovery engineers locate a file faster. 

• Copy your critical files to thumb drives. Copying to a thumb drive is even faster than burning a CD or DVD, and it’s easier to store as well. 

• Consider adding an internal or external hard drive to your system. By using a computer with multiple hard drives, you can store your personal documents on a different drive and volume than your program files.

 http://www.realtor.org/rmotechnology/articles/2008/0809techbackups