In my years of expertise I have run across many people who do not or do occassionally back up the information on their computers. Many of these aquantances I have met have come to me to help them retrieve their information but for many the results of retrieval were nil to nothing.

One of these such cases was a customer and close friend of mine who's computer was damaged in a flood in the the Peterborough, Ontario area in 2004.

She called me up the Morning of the flood and was completely distraught as her computer had been damaged in the flood as well as she lost many of her belongings. Although she was thankful that her baby and house was salvageable, her computer when I went to see her was not. She had lost almost all the pictures she had of her few month old daughter as she saved all the photos from the SD card to her computer but did not make copies saved to disk or anything.

I took her computer home with me to see what if anything I could do but it was beyond repair, set her up with a spare laptop I had and gave it to her and when I did this I also added a backup software and explained to her that this was a very important thing for her to do. I even went so far as to call her family members I had contact with as well as our mutual friends and asked them to send me any photos they may have of her daughter to replace what she had already lost

Whether people in this day and age are backing up using portable hard drives, USB flash drives, which I myself stay clear of as I have lost as many of those myself as I have lost socks in the dryer down some unforseeble abyss to where ever "lost things" eventually accumulate.

My encouragement with this post is to make people aware that even though you may save valuable information your computers it's vital for people to backup their computers using a software that they are comfortable with and adapts to the individuals time frame for backups.

So whether you are backing up using portable hard drives, flash drives, or disc, or are utilizing more secure forms of online data backup, you are using the backup that suits your needs and keeps you from the worry of losing the information that might not be retrievable if your computer crashed or was damaged by some other unforseenable force.