Keep It Safe!

(By Mike Brinkerhoff - from Keeping Up With The Brinkerhoffs)

I hate fearmongering as much as, if not more, than the next guy... But after being personally involved in the following story, I just wanted to spread the word on an important aspect of keeping your computer safe. Well, not necessarily your computer, but your precious data. Documents, pictures, music, all the things that make your computer YOUR computer.

In case any of you have been hiding under a rock or otherwise NOT Keeping Up With the Brinkerhoffs this year, I started my own Tech Services company back in May. This post is promoting a service I offer, but I think it's an important enough service to put a break in the coverage of our adorable baby.

The Friday before Thanksgiving, I upgraded the RAM in a customer's computer.

The following Tuesday I got a call from him, saying that when he got home from work and went to check his email, the monitor stayed black, and this is all he saw:



I told him it looked like there was some kind of hard drive error, and that I could swing by and pick it up. He had wanted to upgrade it to Windows 7 anyway, so we agreed this was a good excuse to do that.

I brought the PC back to my office and pulled out the hard drive so I could copy all their data to a safe location while performing the upgrade. As soon as I plugged the drive in, it started making really loud clicking noises, occasional whirring, and more clicks. I immediately knew this was not good. Sure enough, my laptop wouldn't recognize it as a working disk, because it was no longer a working disk. It was, in fact, a dead disk.

I ended up putting in a new drive and upgrading him to Windows 7, and the computer works great again. But it's working great WITHOUT any of their data. I'm sending his dead drive to a specialist who can usually pull data off dead drives, but that isn't cheap, and it's only a "usually" not an "always".

To sum it all up, I know that many of our readers here save tons of very important data on their PCs. I also know that human nature is to WANT to make frequent backups, but typically that only happens sporadically at best.

If anyone reading this would like to protect their data, I encourage you to join my online backup program. It's a simple, Set 'n' Forget program that copies your files to my secure server every night using your Internet connection. From my central server, it's copied to additional locations to ensure that even if something fails in one location, the data will remain intact.

I like to call it "Peace of mind starting at $15 a month." And that $15 a month is good for up to 30GB of storage, from as many computers as you have in your home or office. Click Here for full details or to sign up.

Mention this blog and get 50% off the first month, making it only $7.50 to take the service for a test drive!