It’s been over four years since I first published a video about phone call and pop-up computer scams. (Haven’t seen it? I’ve added it to the bottom of this post.) Yet, customers/readers/viewers keep falling for it.

However, that’s not what I’m ingeminating about today. Another computer topic I’ve preached and preached about is online backup. Yes, online backup – not external drive backup. Yet, just like the scam I mentioned above, people ignore my advice and they keep losing data because they have no online backup.

Just last week, I was in a home where the customer accidentally deleted an extremely important Word document. They looked all over the computer and couldn’t find it. When I got there, I looked also and it was gone. Needless to say, the customer was very upset. He had started to recreate the legal document but it was going to take days to do that. There was something he had forgotten, though.

My customer had Carbonite backup. If you don’t know, Carbonite keeps different versions of documents you write. I was able to use Carbonite and recover an earlier version of the file which had all the information he wanted except what he had entered the day he accidentally deleted the file. He was very relieved, as you can imagine.

This brings me back to my preaching. The #1 rule for computing is: BACK UP, BACK UP, BACK UP!

Why don’t I like external drives as a primary backup? 1) All hard drives crash; 2) people forget to do the backups; 3) if your computer is hit with ransomware and your external drive is plugged in, the backup files can be encrypted as well as the computer files; 4) External drives are susceptible to power surges and lightning strikes.

Please, (I’m pleading with you!) if you don’t have online backup for your computer, click below and get it today.

Here’s the video I mentioned in the first paragraph. If you haven’t watched it, please do. It’s as viable today as it was when I first published it.