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6 Reasons You Should Back Up Regularly

Let’s start with an annoying truth: you do not want to learn about the importance of backing up your hard drive the hard way. Losing a hard drive is gut wrenching when you don’t have a backup. Here’s why you should back up your hard drive every day.

Every Hard Drive Fails Eventually

Hard drives fail. That’s just what happens. Computers are expensive things with lots of moving components and we expect them to stop working one day. It may not happen for years, but it will eventually happen. Of course, your hard drive may fail much sooner than you like too. Regular wear and tear will ruin a hard drive, but so will power surges, spilled fluids, and toddlers.

Data Recovery Is Expensive

If your hard drive fails, you don’t have a back up, and you really need data recovered, you can pay to make this happen. It will run hundreds of dollars and there’s no guarantee of success.

Memories Are Precious

Here’s a little girl who accidentally deleted a picture sent by her uncle. She’s pretty distraught, learning what ‘deleted’ really means. (Note: her parents gave her a hug and her uncle Dave sent a new picture; that made it all better) Now multiply that feeling by however many precious pictures you have on your hard drive. Is this stuff you really want to risk losing?

Records Are Important

Maybe you do your taxes on your computer. Or your budget. Maybe you have a small business and you keep your records on your computer. Maybe you scan your medical records. Or you keep your family’s calendar digitally.

Our point is: you may have records on your computer that are both important and irreplaceable. In the case of your taxes or business records, it may even be a legal requirement that you maintain records for a number of years.

Simple Recovery 

It happens. You accidentally deleted that file you actually really need. Or you made a bunch of changes to your calendar but now you need to double-check the original date of a very important appointment. Or your nine-year-old swears up and down that they had their book report written on Thursday but it can’t be found anywhere today.

So what to do? Well, if you backup every day with a program like Time Machine, Genie Timeline, or Crashplan, you’ll have a record of files you can go back at look at. They’re pretty easy to use; it’s usually just a matter of plugging in a hard drive at the end of the day or just clicking button.

How Much Time Do You Want to Spend Fixing Your Problem?

Tech problems are a pain to solve. They can be expensive, time consuming, and stressful. But when you have a backup, solving the problem becomes less stressful, less time consuming, and less expensive. Sure, you’ll have to replace your device that failed, but at least you won’t have to replace your data—if that’s even possible.

The Bottom Line

There’s no excuse not to back up your data regularly. You can back up to an external hard drive, the cloud, or both. In fact, we’ve written a whole guide on the smart way to back up, so here’s a good place to start.