This is one of the most important, yet also one of the most neglected areas of computing. Backing up your data should be at the top of your computer maintenance list, right next to Virus Protection. Without data backup or virus protection, you are running the risk of losing your data.
And it will happen,
Don’t think that you don’t have to worry about it.
Data loss can happen in many ways. One of the most common causes is physical failure of the media the data is stored on. You probably have everything saved on your PCs hard drive. That hard drive will not live forever. To quote a friend of mine, “there are only two types of hard drives – the ones that have failed and the ones that will fail.” Yes, normally hard drives will live for years without incident. But eventually they will die. It might happen gradually, by more and more bad clusters accumulating until most of the drive is unusable. Or it might happen suddenly, the hard drive just dies without warning.
Another possible cause for data loss is power failure or spikes. It can result in loss of the document you are currently working on because you did not save it before the power failed and your PC shut down, or in loss of your entire hard drive because a power surge fried your motherboard and destroyed the file allocation table of your hard drive.
The new Phorest software is cloud based so your salon Database will always be safe, and clients using the current Memento 6 should always back up daily to a USB stick, but your other important work files and documents will still need to be backed up in case of failure. There are numerous online backup tools out there but a proven one is https://www.dropbox.com/ When this is setup and working you can access your important files from any PC or even your smart phone. And even better it is free for up to 2GB on storage!
Cahir Hennessy is Support Team Lead for Phorest.com, a leading salon software company in the UK and Ireland.
