Are You Still Not Backing up Your Data?

This article discusses why and how to back up your data, even if you have a hard drive upgrade or an external hard drive.

Why do you need to back up your data? 

If you're like most people, the thought of losing everything on your computer is terrifying. Even with a backup system in place, though, things can still go wrong...

You may lose files on old versions of software or involuntarily delete them yourself; if so, your backup copy will be useless as well. The only way to truly protect yourself is by using an external hard drive that's regularly backed up and stored in a safe location away from the computer.

Even if you have an external hard drive, however, other events could still cause trouble. For example, your computer may be stolen or destroyed. An internal hard drive upgrade to a larger capacity model can result in files that were stored on the old hard drive remaining inaccessible.

To ensure that you don't lose all your data, even in cases such as these, it's important to use multiple backup systems and take frequent backups of your files.

Although you may not realize it, backing up is actually quite easy...

Almost all computers in Japan are using USB memory storage devices like flash disks or USB hard drives (more than 90%), with portable storage media comprising the majority of disk drives used (60% 65%).

See the following statistics:

Japan has a high market penetration of memory storage devices and an increasingly large quantity of home network storage. Japan-based companies like Buffalo, LaCie, Seagate and Maxtor are the most successful in the world.

This is because Japanese people typically use more portable, easy to use, cost effective and reliable flash-based storage than any other country.

We can add this to our list of reasons Japanese people may be doing better than Americans... (Yeah, yeah; I'm sure that's not why you came here...)

Anyway...

The reason we're talking about the Japanese "backup" business is that, according to a recent Reuters article, 90% of Japan's 2.6 million hard drive makers are foreign firms such as Seagate, Maxtor, Samsung and Hitachi.

With the global trend for memory storage trending upward (mainly due 40% in Asia), especially to Japanese people, who like to take their portable storage media around with them wherever they go, the need for data backup is on its way up. The total size of flash memory in use has been growing at a 351 percent rate globally since 2008 with Japan taking the lead; this is definitely good news for companies like Seagate.

So...

Conclusion