What is the information revolution? It is where our data is the most valuable commodity we have. Think about what would happen if your labtop or desktop hardrive crashed or was stolen? It would be disastrous. It happened to me once. A labtop hard drive crashed and I sent it to a data recovery company and was willing to pay $2,000 to have the data back. Unfortunately, they couldn’t retrieve it and I lost six months of work. That was before DVDs and other mass storage devices.

The point is that it is necessary to backup your data regularly and it is possible with a Maxtor 1 Touch. I have one of these drives and set them up at all of my small business clients. If you don’t have one, go to staples.com or another etailer or store and buy one. To back up, configure the software and, as the name says, push one button. If you lose your data, you literally copy and paste from the one touch to the new computer/hard drive with the click of a button. The $200 investment will be the best thing you ever purchased.

With a 64 bit operating system, you may need to download the Seagate backup 64 bit software:

http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?locale=en-US&name=fa-go-desk-xtreme-sw&vgnextoid=a8d3b5b59b7d5110VgnVCM100000f5ee0a0aRCRD

When I used it, I had to replace a hard drive that failed and when I did, it didn’t recognize the external drive I had on the Seagate Software. If that happens, just uninstall and reinstall the software. That worked for me. Thank God, I backed up on Tuesday Evening and the drive failed on Thursday Evening, so I just went to Best Buy and picked up a 500GB 2.5″ internal drive, popped it in, formatted it, copied the data off of it, and was back in business in less than 3 hours.

Yesterday, we had some family over for Christmas and someone said that a hard drive failed and they didn’t have a backup. I felt for him in my heart… He had a book he was writing on there and didn’t have a recent backup. I told them that it happened to me once and to be sure to get a good backup drive and backup system to regularly back up their drive in the future. I have another friend who had a lot of pictures and information on his laptop and his computer was dropped and his hard drive failed, he is in the same boat and I really feel for him, too. I back mine up at least twice per week, or whenever I do a lot of work on my computer that day.

Hope this helps and saves you some time and frustration. I don’t usually give advice, but from working with over 300 companies on a regular basis, if you don’t have a backup drive and need any of the data on your computer in the future, order one or go to Staples or Best Buy and get one NOW!!! Seriously, NOW!

-Tom Roman