When most people think of backup they immediately think of their hard drive dying. This is actually sort of inconvenient for those of us in the SaaS (Software as a Service) backup space since with SaaS the risk is not really that the hard drive will fail – Google, Salesforce and others protect you pretty effectively from that with their redundant systems.
The real risk is user error, which doesn’t go away when you move your data to the cloud. People generally get this pretty quickly and understand why backing up cloud data is important. But that’s not the point of this blog post – the point is that I spend a fair amount of time explaining to people that your hard drive dying isn’t the risk we protect you from.
So of course my home hard drive died.
I took my (fairly old) iMac to the Apple store to talk to the nice people at the Genius Bar. My helper, let’s call him Mike, plugged in my Mac and verified that yes, it would not boot up. “I think your hard drive is probably finished,” he said, and then there was an awkward pause. “It’s okay, I’m backed up” I said. Mike smiled, and the two other Apple employees behind the bar (who were with other customers) smiled. Everyone visibly relaxed. I asked how often that was the case.
“Ninety percent of the people this happens to aren’t backed up,” said Mike. Ninety percent! And these are Mac users, who have Time Machine already loaded on their computer. I didn’t tell him I’m actually backed up twice (local drive at home in addition to my online backup), I didn’t want Mike to think I’m some sort of backup junkie.
So the moral of this blog post is – even if you have Backupify for your cloud data (and the local data in Google Drive) – you should always back up your home computer, too! Don’t be part of the unprotected 90 percent. Make sure you have a comprehensive backup plan.
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