Internet Business Tip #10- Backing Up Your Work

I was in my second year of running my internet business. I was making a decent living and things were doing well. Then one day I turned on my computer, except it didn’t. It was totally dead. I had no idea what the problem was. It was working fine just the day before.

Well, to make a long story short, I took my PC to the local PC repair place and the hard drive had totally dropped dead on me. They tried to salvage what they could but it was no use. Everything was gone, fried, lost forever.

I had to get a new drive, a new operating system and so on. And then it hit me…

Oh my God, I just lost 2 years of work!

Now, I don’t have to tell you how much stuff you can accumulate in 2 years. The number of bookmarks I had in my Internet Explorer alone was over 100 at least. How was I going to get all these sites back? For that matter, how would I even remember what all the sites were?

And then there were all the programs I installed. Sure, I had the CD for most of them and could reinstall them with my new system, but what about the programs I downloaded off the Internet? I didn’t even have the receipts for them anymore because they were lost along with everything else. I would probably have to buy them again.

Needless to say, this experience was a total nightmare for me. But I learned something from it. I learned to back up ALL my work regularly. Since that time, whenever I had a PC crash, it was a minor annoyance at worst.

For those of you who aren’t sure how to go about protecting your work, there are several ways you can do this.

1. Backup Hard Drive – This is the most expensive but is probably the best way to go. By having a backup external hard drive, it’s very easy to simply take your data and transfer it from your main PC to the backup drive. You should do this at least once a week.

2. CD Backup – If you can’t afford a backup drive, at least get yourself some blank CDs and burn your data onto them. Mark the backup dates on each CD so you know which one is the most recent. It’s not the most efficient, but it is cheap.

3. Raided Drives – This is for people who really have some cash to throw around, and yes it is even more expensive than just having a backup hard drive. By having raided drives in your PC, your data is automatically backed up to the other drive without you having to do anything.

However you decide to protect your data, make sure it gets done. The last thing you want is to go through what I went through.

Trust me, it’s NOT fun.