Last week, I documented the story of how I made my move to Windows 7. If you remember, as part of that move, I replaced old hard drives with newer and bigger ones. I recommend the method used if it’s in your budget. You can read about it here and here.

Part of that process was removing old hard drives and turning them into external drives so that I could move data onto the new drives and keep an archived copy for awhile. It was during that part of the process that i got to visit the external hard drive grave yard here at Gillware.

The grave yard I’m referring to is not too far from my desk. It’s the place where we store all of the old parts from your external drives until we’re finished with the work of recovering your data. Walking into this room was like having the opportunity to travel into the past. Back into a time when the parts I saw lying before me were part of someone’s life. The part of their life that felt so secure at one point. Until their drive failed on them, and they were forced to ship it our way.

I wish every customer of ours and every potential customer of our remote data back-up service could walk through this room at least once.

Why?

What struck me as I dug through piles of old external hard drive cases was the sheer fragility of your data – especially when you’re relying on an external drive for your only data back-up. What I witnessed was only a fraction of what comes in our front door every year. Only a fraction of the false sense of security so many are relying on to keep their data assets safe.

Until it happens to you, it will be difficult to truly relate to what I’m saying here today. Until it happens to you, your belief system won’t allow you to believe that it’s possible.

In a time somewhat long ago, runners broke the 4 minute per mile barrier. I don’t even know who it was, and I’m not going to look it up now.  The point is that someone trained hard enough for a long enough period of time, and then decided that what people thought couldn’t be done, could be done and he did it. Until he did it, no one else did. And today, it’s done all the time.

The false sense you have right now that you are protected with your external hard drive back-up is fleeting. You just don’t know it yet.   Hard drives crash all day long.  This fact is just hard to see until you see it every day.  It does happen, and if you say where I sat, and walked through the grave yard I walked through last week, you would see clearly that it happens all the time to someone. So, why take the chance?

Set up your remote backup system right now. That way, when you break your 4 minute mile barrier (whenever that might be) you won’t hurt so much.

PS Be sure to read my next post on this subject. This is a perfect example of what I’m talking about.