Most home computer and even business users never think of backing up their data simple because they never think that they can lose their data someday . Having such imagination is very bad because that is the greatest risk one can ever take . Imagine loosing the whole data of your business . This can even cause your business to collapse . So it is a wise idea to have a backup plan for your data or a restore plan that will protect your business should something go wrong . Computers nowadays are absolute necessity to our lifes and the data which resides on our computer is the most important asset . What will you do incase you lose your business data or your very important data ?
There are many reasons for data loss which may happen someday to you . You can lose your data through computer hardware failure , software failure , natural disaster , computer theft , fire and more . I have been in the IT industry for more than 10 year now and have heard of stories where computers were stolen from offices . Laptops stolen from the seat of cars . Just by forgetting your laptop somewhere , you may never find it again . There have been a case where the computers of a company where stolen and the company hard to ceased trading for about 9 Months . If they hard a backup plan in place this wouldn't have happened . My best advise is that you should prevent data loss in the first place by implementing a data backup plan . Avoid saying that data loss can never happen to you .
The ways you can secure your data are many . You can use :

CD or DVD to store your data . CD or DVD storage is great for individuals but it can somehow be costly . A CD stores 700MB of data . So incase you have 50GB of data to store , how many CD's will you need ? You will need about 35 CD's . You can see that it can be very costly and time consuming incase you want to view your data .

Another method you can use to backup your data is external hard drives . We now have external hard drives having very small size like an iphone and having a storage capacity of 500GB and more . The are very small to the extend that you can carry them along with you . However external hard drives has their own disadvantages . Most often they fail to function after a length of time . They fail to function just like Laptops and you might not be able to access your data again . This has actually happened to me . Due to their very small size , they can easily be stolen or they may get missing . So the probability of losing your data with an external hard drive is very high .

The third and most important method of protecting your data is offsite backup . Ofsite backup is the process where your data is hosted with a company online in a different location . The company will provide to you an online storage space when you register with them on their website . You just need to login in your online storage space then upload all your data to their server . Their server may be located in another country . The company may have about 3 different servers located in 3 different countries so that your data can be replicated or transferred to these servers . This ensures that your data is highly protected . The storage space provided by these offsite backup companies are very great . You can store about 500GB of data , 1000GB of data and more . No need to worry about storage space . Most businesses today are using offsite backup and even lots of individuals . With offsite backup , you don't need to be afraid of your data been lost due to natural disaster such as fire , Hurricanes , floods and more .

To read other articles why you should backup your data and to see a list of some free online data backup services visit http://www.online-backup-service.net

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Data can and should be protected and backed up at all time. I use Spinbackup for its office 365 backup service at https://spinbackup.com/products/office-365-backup/ and more. It offers me to protect my computer and data from ransomware and even teaches me to do migrate my data. I find it as the best-suited service for me.