A few days ago in my post titled, “Data loss happens when you least expect it- NEVR2 for 20% off RoboForm and GoodSync”, I described a particularly catastrophic accident that affected a friend of mine. If you didn’t read that post, you should probably read it again to catch up. I thought it would be prudent to let everybody know… even though that was an extreme case, it is not nearly as hard to suffer a failure which is just as costly.
Some of you may know already that when I’m not scouring the web looking for sales, I work as an IT consultant in Florida. Florida is a particularly good place to be an IT consultant due to the particularly bad storms we get on a regular basis. It also happens to be a bad place to be anything electronic… but that’s another story. The past couple weeks have seen a number of lightning storms.
Every storm season I receive lots of calls from a clients about dead computers which won’t power up, have blinking lights, etc. Yesterday was no exception, I received a frantic call by one of my clients who complained that their computer wouldn’t power on. I scheduled an emergency appointment and was was promptly at their house soon after. Once I got there to assess the situation, both the power supply and motherboard had been blown by a surge.
They were immediately worried about losing their family pictures. I assured them that with my specialized arsenal of tools and software, I can usually retrieve any lost data in most cases. Most likely the procedure will finish without a hitch, but it is a time consuming process.
As I explained to them that there could be no guarantees until it was done, I reminded them of our conversation a few weeks ago. At that time, I recommended that they purchase a copy of goodsync, and a removable hard drive. I would then configure it to make automatic backups when they plugged it in. As most people who haven’t suffered data loss, they declined, and I left.
Had they made a different decision that day, they would have had an up to date backup of all their critical files, and I would have had them up and running yesterday. Because they didn’t however, they now have to pay for data recovery which, as I mentioned before, is a time consuming task.
Long story short… I have a feeling that they will have a different answer the next time I suggest a backup routine.
