Back up Your PC

By Staff writers, PC Authority

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Your photos, music and data are just a virus or hard disk failure away from oblivion. Build a triple-layer defence using PC Authority's practical guide.

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The most valuable item in your PC isn’t the CPU, the graphics card, or the $600 office suite – it’s the data sitting on your hard drive. Even if you only use your system for personal use, it probably holds several gigabytes of documents, music, photos and video, all of which could be lost should your hard drive fail or you suffer an attack from a worm or virus. And, while hardware can be replaced and software reinstalled, two years worth of emails, digital photos, word documents and mp3 tracks can be lost at a stroke – unless you have them safely backed up.

And that data is only more vulnerable if your main system is mobile. For one thing, a notebook PC is more fragile than a desktop PC. Analysts at Gartner estimate that 15 percent of laptops purchased will break within the first year and 22 percent will falter within 4 years, compared to 5 percent and 12 percent for a desktop system. Motherboards and hard drives are the components most likely to fail, and if it’s the latter, then retrieving data can be an expensive business. What’s more, notebooks are also more susceptible to theft or loss – particularly if they travel regularly. Losing a laptop is never easy, but it should be insured and so replaceable. Your data may not be.

In the home, data loss is a cause of misery, but in a business context it can seriously hurt your bottom line. A corrupt or damaged hard disk will – at the very least – cost you expensive man-hours, and at the worst you'll lose data vital to the productivity or running of your company. According to data from the DTI’s Information Security Breaches Survey, 2006, the average cost to a business of their worse incident of malware attack or hardware failure may be anywhere between $20,000 and $40,000, when you consider the financial implications - from lost time to recovery costs to damaged perceptions.

So why are we so bad at backing up? Last year, a survey by Harris Interactive concluded that 35 percent of computer users never backed up their data, and of those that did 75 percent only did so once a month. Amazingly, small businesses fare worse: a Gartner report estimates that only one percent of small businesses back up daily.

The ironic thing is that simple, affordable hardware and software mean backup should be a no-brainer. Think not? Maybe you just don’t know where to start? Well, that’s where we come in. Over the next few pages, we’ll look at the options available, and make backup so easy that there just won’t be any excuse.

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