In the last week I have taken in two hard drives (one in a plastic sleeve and one in a laptop) that are completely toast. Both users did not have anything properly backed up and they lost files. We cannot stress this enough, ALWAYS have a backup plan, whether its google drive/ dropbox/ skydrive or a External Harddrive or USB Key, always have a plan B.

Data recovery for the average IT Shop (your’s truly included) only have a few tools where we can extract data at the bit level (the 1’s and 0’s) but if your heads are damaged or your Partition Table is gone, there is little we can do (unless we know some tricks about faking Partition Tables, damaged heads are usually a DOA scenario)

Out of both of these hard drives (and ones in the past) the reason they come on their last ounces of breath is because they have been dropped. If you drop your laptop or your tower gets knocked over, IMMEDIATELY backup your files, you can almost guarantee hard drive damage in some form. There are some cases (I dropped my laptop from 5 ft and the hard drive was fine… the screen wasn’t) where the hard drive will survive the fall, do not take the chance.

Wouldn’t it be nice if your backup was done automatically for you every time you touched your computer? This obviously is a paid service but you could MacGuyver something together with Robocopy or SyncBack SE (both of which are amazing free tools) but I am talking about 100% automatic, you type three words in a document and hit the save button, within 60 seconds there is a copy of it on the internet in a secure personalized vault. Sounds cool and ridiculously expensive doesn’t it? It’s not (the expensive part)

Carbonite has a backup service that starts at $60 USD per year which gives Home users unlimited online storage on one PC. If you want to backup your one external hard drive you have kicking around, the service jumps $40 USD per year.

On top of having all your files neatly stored in a secure place in the cloud, it also comes with remote access and a free app on your phone so you can access your pictures/ documents etc. on the go without lugging around your laptop (or your desktop)

Carbonite is available for Mac and Windows PC users, Contact Us today to help get you started with your backup plan

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