5 reasons why you should routinely backup your data!

It has been about 1 week since that terrible day. I flip open my 6 month old Macbook Pro to find that it wont start. Puzzled, I walk to the local mac store to find out the hard drive has randomly failed and needs to be replaced. Uggh! Several days later, I am still working through trying to get back to where I was prior to the day of doom. Going to random sources where I saved files online, scrounging around looking for installation discs to get my critical applications up and running, restoring my media from an Itunes library stored on another home computer…it is just painful! What are the lessons learned?

1. No matter how new and stable you think your computer is, stuff happens and devices fail. Living with this fact in the back of your mind will help you realize that some things are just out of your control. Give yourself a safety net and backup your data!

2. Anything you guard as precious should be backed up immediately in order to avoid data loss. If for some reason you would be terribly upset to loose a document or media file forever, then you should back it up somewhere safe.

3. If you are like me, being a busy expansion stage business venture capital professional, and the thought of technology downtime makes you want to vomit, know that if you don’t routinely backup your data you are leaving yourself exposed to a nightmare! For both you and the organization you are apart of, make sure you are not exposed to data loss. It has the potential to have a severe negative impact on your business.

4. Backing up your data is cheap and easy. From external hard disks, to Apple’s time machine, to services like Intronis (one of the companies we provided venture funding to), there is no reason why you can’t get in a rhythm of backing up your data.

5. The idea has probably popped up in your head many times and for some reason you keep de-prioritizing it because its not a current problem. You probably want to keep it from being a problem…that’s what backups are for!

Luckily, the failure did not have any severe negative impact on anything over the course of the week (and I was able to scrounge things together). However, some stuff still got lost and its not fun. Make sure you and your organization are not exposed and just start doing it!

-KKF