Losing data can be a costly experience. It affects many people; however, there are measures you can take to ensure it won’t happen to you. Whilst the future is heading towards cloud computing, the majority of people don’t currently use these services due to affordability and low connection speeds.

If you are a typical home computer user, then you probably store your files on your computer’s hard drive. The problem with this is that if your hard-drive has a hardware failure, or gets a severe virus, the outcome is potentially the loss of all files stored on the hard-drive. Although you can sometimes regain files from a hard-drive that has failed, it can be costly and time consuming.

Many years ago people were able to store files on floppy disks, and then more recently CD-Rs, DVD-Rs, and Blu-Ray. Whilst this can be a good way of backing up things, it takes time, they are easily lost over time, and they can get scratched.

The future is definitely in cloud computing as stated above. But until that option becomes available for you or your business, you should consider buying an external hard drive. If you purchase an external hard-drive, then this will enable you to speedily and regularly make backups of your entire desktop. Another advantage is that you can take the hard-drive where ever you go, and plug it in to other hardware devices such as laptops.

A CD-R can hold around 800MB’s of data, DVD-R’s can hold around 4GBs of data, Blu-Rays up to around 50GB of data. You can buy an external hard-drive relatively cheaply with as much as 2TBs of data, which is 2000GB. You will probably need no more than 1000GB – 1TB.

Take action today and ensure you have a Data recovery plan, don’t leave it until it’s too late. Depending on the quality and usage of your hard-drive, a hard-drive generally lasts between 4-8 years; they usually go unexpectedly without any early warnings.