Maintenance

We don't have a problem getting the oil changed in our cars on a regular basis, or having our houses painted when it starts to peel. We pay people to clean our houses and offices. We pay to have our lawns mowed and maintained. Either we pay or we do it ourselves. The point is that it seems obvious to most people that these things need to be done. What doesn't seem so obvious to a lot of people is that they need to backup their computer's hard disk.

When the house gets messy, we have visual indicators that something needs to be done (or we trip over things). When the grass gets tall, the lawn needs mowing. You probably won't have an indicator that your computer files need to be backed up. That is probably why so many people don't do any regular backups of their data. The fuel gauge in the car tells us when to stop and refuel. But your computer is not going to tell you when you need to backup your data.

I had a flash in my brain; "I could write a program that runs in the background and tells me when my data needs to be backed up!". But on second thought, the data needs to be backed up every day. If I use the computer and create any new files, or modify any existing files, then the new and changed data needs to backed up. I have been programming computers and working in the industry since the 1970's. I have seen many hard drives fail. I have had many of my own hard drives fail. Actually, I always worry about losing my data. You may think I am paranoid, but you should be too! Every hard disk drive will eventually fail, and you never know when it is going to happen.

I used to save my backup data to tapes, but a few years ago I started using online backup services. Online backup makes the backup process 100% automatic, and my data is stored off site automatically also. I have no reason to be paranoid now. What are you doing about backing up your computer data?