Plan ahead or lose your data

Whether it's the CEO or an employee, when you lose your laptop or your hard drive crashes, the whole company could be at risk... if you don't plan ahead and make a backup strategy. DO something about it today and you may well save your business from disaster or a serious setback.

Buying a PC or Mac and starting to use it is easy. When you develop a spreadsheet to solve daily problems, the computer seems like it's really helping the company. When the lead salesperson uses ACT! or Outlook on their computer to regularly reach all the clients, they look great. But when the hard drive crashes and you can't get to that valuable info anywhere else or your laptop gets stolen or falls into the pool, your business may be at risk if you don't have a backup strategy and have been using it religiously.

Think about what would happen if you lost your home computer, the one with all your family pictures on it. Are there any backup copies? Or would all those valuable memories be gone? That's what it's like for so many businesses because they are too busy to install and practice using a sound backup strategy.

If you want to prevent this fomr happening, read about backup strategies in this blog entry or read the following suggestions are for those of you who have had a hard drive crash, if your harddrive isn't working well enough to boot or if you hard disk is gone because the computer or laptop it was in has been stolen:

Hard drive failure or loss

It’s often that people think their hard drive is completely “bad” because the machine won’t boot up or it locks up. There is a difference between getting a little damage on your hard drive files and the physical hardware of the harddrive being dead, even though the result to a user seems to be the same.

How do you know your harddrive is bad? If it isn’t a professional super-geek telling you the hard drive is genuinely, physically dead, then don’t let anyone mess with the hard drive until you give it to a pro. If it’s just the files on the harddrive that are a little messed up and the physical equipment is still good, a pro can likely retrieve some or all of the data using recovery programs that work even when portions of the hard drive or directories are damaged.

Recovering files and pictures from USB memory sticks

When you move files or pictures off your memory sticks onto the computer, it seems like the memory stick has been cleared. It has not. The old files are still there, but they have been hidden and they remain retrievable until you re-use the memory stick for taking new pictures or storing new files. If you clean off your memory stick often, there are likely to be old files and pictures hiding on it, you just need to check by using a recovery program. This will not get everything off, but can recover files you think are long gone.

Old computers, email client, other people’s computers

When you upgrade to a new computer, people often just leave their old computer lying around in a closet or garage or the supply room. Do you still have your old computer, the one you were using when the missing files were orginally created? Boot it back up and see if you can find some of your old files.

When you send emails with attachments or contact inforomation about someone, a copy of the outbound email (along with any attachments) is saved in your email client for some time. Check with your Sent Items folder or on your Exchange server or in your Archive folder. If you use Google Mail, HotMail, hosted Mac Mail or Exchange, its likely your email has been archived and is easily accessible online.

When people receive emails with attachments, they typical keep them for some time. Ask co-workers, vendors and customers to check their Inbox or your-company folder, their Archive Folders, and their email attachment directory. If they find copies, have them email them back to you.

Moving forward

You can use online services like the ones from Sklar, Apple, or Dell that back your PC up to a place out on the web just in case you lose your hard drive or whole laptop.

Or you could buy a small external hard drive and use the automatic backup program they come with to frequently create an at-home or at-the-office backup when you connect your laptop.

Or, even better, you could use a free program/service like Google’s Picasa to scan and upload pictures or Google's Docs to store your important documents at Google's data centers.

There is still hope

So, make sure you check with a professional before you throw away or fiddle with your crashed harddrive and make plans today so you have a backup strategy in place before a computer crash sets your company back.