In an age where we are all connected, protecting your data is probably the most important yet overlooked aspect of computers. Whether it is pictures of your kids on your home computer or sensitive client information on your business servers, the data you have is valuable or even priceless. There are two aspects of data protection I want to discuss and hopefully help you think about. Having worked in the insurance industry for many years I live by the motto: “Plan for the worst and hope for the best.” Data loss and data theft are very real yet not difficult to prevent.

First is data backup. If you only have one copy of your data and it gets lost, it may be gone forever. Now we have many different data recovery tools but they can be time consuming and sometimes expensive. If you lost your data and it were unrecoverable, what would be the cost? For some, lost memories, for other lost clients and lost income. Proactive steps to make backup copies can prevent this from happening. There are good ways and bad ways to back up your data.

Data loss can occur easily in many circumstances. Do you have a digital camera? How often do you take the photos off your camera? I’m reminded of a client who had hundreds of family photos on her camera. She never moved them from her camera to a computer. When her memory card in the camera became corrupt, she lost all her pictures.

Saving files to your hard drive is not enough either. Hard drive failure is a huge risk which occurs far too often. Fire, flood, theft, and lightning are other common factors to consider. You need a good quality backup solution that creates an off-site secure copy of your data. For photos, there are online solutions such as Flickr.com (owned by Yahoo) that allows you to upload your photos. You can then keep them private or share them with others. The downside to this option is that downloading them back to your computer would be incredibly time consuming.

In the corporate environment many businesses rely tape backups for their servers. Tape backups have quite a reputation for being unreliable. Plus there’s the issue of what to do with the tape. I did an installation just this weekend for a client. While working on the server I noticed that the tape backup was right there in the server. That certainly defeats the purpose. If something happened to the server, the tape would go right with it. Even when taken off-site, the tape can be easily damaged, lost or stolen.

Nerds On Site offers backup protection for all your data. We use state of the art technology to create off site backups which are secure and easy to access when you need them. We use encryption technology that meets government requirements for legal and medical information. That means you are the only one who gets to see your data (unless you give away your password of course). We even offer a 14-day free trial. If you want to give it a try, I’ll install it for you for free. To sign up on your own, just visit our site.

There are plenty of other options for backing up your data. Just be sure, whatever method you use, you are careful and be sure you know the pros and cons.

The second data protection topic is encryption. Encryption is what makes your data completely unreadable and unusable to anyone who doesn’t have your password. Poorly implemented encryption can be more dangerous than no encryption. It gives you a false sense of security and can lure you into being more careless with your sensitive data.

Password selection is critical. Security experts warn us not to use words that are found in the dictionary. Even when used in combination with numbers or other words, passwords using dictionary words can be quickly and easily cracked or even guessed. There are many tools available to hackers which make this process easy. So you should use a combination of upper case and lower case letters, numbers and if possible symbols. Longer passwords are better. There are a lot of good random password generators that you can use. For everyday users, I recommend Roboform or Any Password. To get a really strong completely random password, just visit Steve Gibson’s password generator, it’s unbeatable.

If you have sensitive data of any kind, it should be encrypted. Whether it is client data or last years tax documents, you have a responsibility to yourself and others to keep that data secure. These days there can even be legal ramifications for not keeping certain types of data secure. If that data is being stored on a portable device such as a usb key or a laptop, encryption is not optional. Your data needs to be protected. Encryption is not expensive or difficult at all. The best encryption tool in the world, TrueCrypt, is absolutely free and it’s very easy to use.

I hope this will not only get you thinking but get you to take action today to protect your data. If you have data that needs to be protected, I would love to help. If you have questions, let me know, I’m always available.