Alisa

I learned this the hard way.  Lost client records of more than 4,000 clients.  Luckily, I had hard copy records, but it was very painful to recreate.

Great Advice.

Merry Christmas

Oh darn I wish I'd know about Maxtor before I bought a $125 external hard drive that's NOT automatic.  You're smarter than the average bear Alisa.  

If you want to go a step further (what if you have a fire or flood damage- both CPU and backup are ruined!) There are some sites you can subscribe to that will back up your data weekly but on their surver through the internet. Thanks Alisa.

Since we're in an industry that works closely with clients' personal information, I'm hesitant to recommend online storage without strict encryption. Off-site backups, though sometimes difficult to maintain, are a wonderful idea!

 In addition to working in Real Estate and Finance, I have about 9+ years experience in the I.T. industry, including a job with Scripps Institution of Oceanography while I was at UCSD as a data archivist and systems specialist intern. If there's one thing I've learned... it's that data loss occurs at the most inopportune times and it "takes NO prisoners" according to a PhD student I was working with who lost about 130 hours of research when two (yeah... two) of his mirrored hard drives crashed at the same time. 

 For those of you *cough*Rita*cough* who are sad because you didn't get a special one-touch backup system, there is hope! I've been recommending Symantec Backup Exec for automatic backups. (http://www.symantec.com/backupexec/index.jsp) There's no single solution for all businesses or individuals, but it's important to find the one that works for you. 

"Don't it always seem to go, that you don't know what you've got 'til __________?"  

Great topic, Alyssa! 

Alisa-

I personally run two separate hard drives in my system, it's called a RAID setup (Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks), what it does is to store a mirror image of everything a do on a separate disk, within the tower- that is free of an operating system. You cant go wrong with it, and it's all internal.

 It is also wise not to use your business computer for anything other than business, meaning no surfing, chatting, or browsing(other than trusted sites like MLS, tax assessors, county records, fema...etc.). Also, you should look into system cleaning programs like Spybot seek and destroy, and adaware, these are very effective in keeping the bugs out-  on that not, check a program called TeaTimer, it encapsulates your registry, and protects it from modifications cause by hidden programs called "browser helper objects"- that dont help a damn thing!.