There is never any doubt about the biggest weakness I will find in someone’s computer system. They will likely have more than adequate bandwidth, usually from a wireless router. They will generally be running virus protection software with updates that are relatively current. They probably even have spyware protection and operate behind a firewall. They will more than likely have decent software for the jobs they want to accomplish whether it is Photoshop, an HTML editor, or simply the latest in Word. But, I know what most of them will not have – an effective storage and backup system.

You have probably been through this at some point in your life. Nothing is a bigger hassle than having your computer go down and losing all the information you have accumulated over time. It is not only your business, but it is your life with photos, your favorite music, and home videos. It is stuff that is simply irreplaceable. You may have even gone to your local computer shop and paid them some outrageous amount of money to attempt some data recovery. While they may have got some of your stuff back, they usually do not get it all and what is recovered may never be the same again.

Now when this happened, you probably made all kinds of plans about how you would never let it happen again. You may have bought an external hard drive or a stack of CDs or DVDs and put on your “To Do” list a weekly backup procedure. I have a family of computer users so I set up a separate box to back up all of the computers to. It was a great system, but it required the users to manually go in and do a periodic backup. Inevitability we would get lax and over time someone would blow up a hard drive and we would find that they had not done a recent backup.

Well, there are no longer any excuses. First of all, for those of you that are somewhat techie, you can now set up a storage and backup system that will automatically backup the data of your choice to another computer in your house or business; I recommend a standalone box that is only used for backups. Now, however, there are cheap online processes where you can have your data continuously backed up. In fact, as soon as you make a change to a document on your computer, that change will be backed up to an online host.

It is probably cheaper than what you are paying for your antivirus service and I would argue it is more important. I never set up a computer in my home or business without implementing the automatic backup with an online host. Then I do not have to worry about it. Whatever my employees or family members do, I know we can survive any computer crash. Once a machine is restored or replaced, with the push of a button we can load all documents, photos, mp3s, and other personal information back onto their machine.