The last thing most Realtors® are thinking about during their busy day is backing up their computer data. That is, until the day you fire up your laptop and, ooops, you get the ‘blue screen of death’ or more commonly some virus that wreaks havoc on the OS (operating system) and you get to spend your day scrambling to recover. I guarantee you, you cannot sell houses if you can’t get to your information.
This will happen to you one day, no one is immune!
Here’s a brief story about my own recent reminder about data loss. One morning recently I started up my desktop computer and wham, I got the lovely notice that my hard drive was going bad and I better ‘contact customer service at Dell’ right away. Good news and bad news here. I keep my data on a separate hard drive, so I was OK there, but I have the tendency to save some documents on the desktop for ease of use. About half of these docs were lost.
Long story short, I spent the next two days trying to recover my lost data and restore the programs (including the OS) on a new drive. It was a hastle! (But at least I know how to do it.) The moral of the story is, you are never safe from data loss or possible disc disaster. Invest the money in a good external hard drive and make it your religion to back up the entire computer at least weekly, and your data daily. The cost in time and gray hairs is much more, I promise.
If you are on the go too much to fumble with an external hard drive, look into online data backup.
As Nike says, Just Do It!
Steve O’Sullivan
Filed under: Technology | Tagged: backup drive, bad hard drive, data recovery, oh crap
