Computer Data Loss is a Thing of the Past?

Not so long ago, when your PC or laptop had a hard drive crash or file system you were likely to lose most of, if not all, of your computer data. 

The anxiety and stress that you feel when you know you have lost your computer data is immense. It may not be a stressful as getting divorced or moving house but it must be somewhere near the top of list of bad things that happen to you when you had forgotten to backup your computer. Your precious collection of photographs, documents and videos would have been lost unless you had remembered to carry out a physical back-up of it all onto an external hard drive or USB mass storage device.

Most large companies have a computing infrastructure which is supposed to help you recover your data by backing it up automatically. But, my experience of these services is that they were not always as reliable as you would like them to be, and you had to wait an awfully long time before you could shut down your computer while the back-up of your personal folders was completed through your network connections.

There have been back-up services available for a while, such as Microsoft SkyDrive, but they were never that easy to use and the ability to share documents or files within them was fiddly at best.

The public cloud environment has made the stress felt after a hard drive crash and the arrival of Google Drive last week marked how serious the market now is for storing your computer data online. Google Drive is what used to be called Google Docs and is a free service which allows you 5GB of online storage of your files which can all be synchronized automatically, backing up data without you even realizing it. All you need is Google account to get hold of this service for storing computer data.

A hard drive crash may be something you just laugh about in future.