By Dan Kittay
Owner, Kittay New Media

Whenever I hear of a disaster such as the recent hurricanes that wracked Florida, I think of two things almost simultaneously: I hope no one got hurt or lost their home, and I hope people had backups of their computer data.

We have all become so dependent on our computers, to do everything from managing our association’s finances to reading this article. Some of us have almost all of our important information locked into the little 0’s and 1’s that reside on the surface of our hard drives.

Yet how many of us take the time to make current, ongoing backups of that information? If you lost everything on your computer today, how long would it take you to recover it and continue from where you left off before the loss? Would you even be able to replace everything?

It takes a lot less than a hurricane to cause a catastrophic loss of computer data. A surge or drop on your electric line can do it. Some of today’s viruses and worms can erase information before you realize it’s happening.

And it doesn’t have to be as dramatic as that; hard drives are appliances, just like refrigerators and air conditioners. Ever have an air conditioner shut down, and need a service call? Hard drives spin at speeds up to 10,000 RPMs, and as with any appliance, at some point the wear-and-tear means they will stop working. With an air conditioner, it’s easy to swap in a new part, as the rest of the parts don’t need to “remember” any information that was stored on the old part. With hard drives, it’s more complicated. You may lose all the information that’s been stored on them.

With a current backup, the worst that can happen is that you’ll have to spend some time reloading that information onto your new hard drive, although you may not have anything you worked on since your last backup. Without that backup, where do you even begin to reconstruct all your work?

Those of you who work in larger bars probably have some kind of network server where all your work is stored. Your IT department probably makes nightly backups of the server, and if you had a problem could restore your information. But if you don’t have that luxury, or if there is work that you store on your computer’s hard drives, then you need to be making those nightly backups yourselves.

Ideally, you’d make two sets of backups, one to keep in your office, and one in another secure place, such as your home (if your office is destroyed in a fire, and your backups are sitting on a shelf next to your computer, they won’t do you much good).

In the less-than-ideal world we all live in, at least one set of backups is mandatory for some level of protection. These days most computers have CD or DVD drives that can record information onto those discs. Typical backup software will back up anything that’s been changed or added since the last backup, so after you make your first backup of everything on your computer, subsequent backups should take very little time.

If you don’t have a CD/DVD drive in your computer, you can buy one to hook up to it. Or you could use a tape drive, an external hard drive, or even a Web site devoted to storing backups.

Many of us don’t learn the importance of backups until it’s too late. In my case, I was lucky. At a very early point in my career, I worked for a newspaper, and lost a 15-inch story in the new computer about a half-hour before deadline, and had to re-create it with an editor standing over my shoulder. I learned about the fragility of computer data, and have been making regular backups since then. I hope that you don’t have to go through a similar or worse fate to “see the light.”