Do you have a current backup of your genealogy data? How about your checkbook program, last year's income tax, your family's digital photographs, and other important documents?
All disk drives will fail sooner or later. It is not a question of IF your disk drive will fail, it is only a matter of WHEN. Unfortunately, predicting the time and date of a hard drive failure is about as easy as predicting next year's stock market numbers. The failure may not happen for years, or it may happen five minutes from now. The only thing that is certain is that it will eventually fail.
You may have genealogy information that required hundreds of hours to assemble. Replacing that information after your hard drive fails could be a big problem. Then there are those family photographs… . Can you easily replace them?
Hard drive failures are not the only risk to digital information. Ask any computer owner who was in the midst of Hurricane Katrina or the other hurricanes last year. Then there are fires, floods, tornadoes, and a host of other threats to computer equipment that must be considered. Stored data on your hard drive has many enemies. You must protect your data carefully.
Backups are critical, but you do not want to store your only backups in the same building with your computer. If a hurricane, tornado, flood, or other natural disaster will ruin your computer and its contents, the same disaster will probably also destroy your locally-stored backup copies. A locally-stored backup copy may be no better than no backups at all. You need to store backup copies "off-site," at a location that will not be threatened by a local disaster where you live.
What can you do about this? Luckily there are several easy solutions. At least one of those solutions is also available for a very low price. In fact, it is so cheap that you really need to ask yourself if you can afford to use a computer without this or a similar service.
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