10 Reasons to Back Up During a Recession

Earlier this week the Ur-Guru sent me a link to a Tech Republic article entitled “10 Reasons to Purchase New Hardware During a Recession.” He encouraged me to write a post giving 10 reasons to back up during a recession.

I’d actually been trying to persuade him to write a column, because one of his older systems went up in smoke recently. (He suspects an overloaded capacitor. I had to ask what those were; it’s been a long time since I’ve actually opened up a computer and inspected the insides.) He objected that there was no story there. “I had backups. Of course I had backups. And anyway, that system was just holding my third set of backups, so nothing was really lost.” I like  man who’s well-prepared. He’s now planning to rebuild that system as a monster storage unit packed with 2.5” drives, the better to keep more backups.

But back to the recession. As far as I can tell, it’s important to back up no matter what’s going on with the economy, but anything as expensive as data loss is undeniably something to be avoided when credit is tight and cash flow is flowing in the wrong direction.

So here are the original list and my riff on it.

10 reasons to purchase new hardware during a recession (by Erik Eckel)

#1: Equipment still wears out
#2: Productivity becomes paramount
#3: Downtime is expensive
#4: Competition suffers, too
#5: Manufacturers offer discounts
#6: Consultants are more willing to negotiate
#7: Running older hardware longer costs more
#8: Interrupting purchase cycles is expensive
#9: New applications require greater resources
#10: Employee retention remains a consideration

10 Reasons to Back Up During a Recession

1. Hard drives still fail during a recession
2. There are more out-of-work hackers to create viruses
3. Data recovery is expensive
4. Re-creating lost data from scratch is even more expensive
5. Data loss can easily put you out of business (see items 2-4)
6. Storage gets cheaper every day
7. There are free online backup services
8. There’s free software for making offline backups, too
9. Since you probably won’t be buying new hardware (even after reading Eckel’s post), you’re more likely to experience equipment failure
10. Failure to back up won’t do a darn thing to increase your income or reduce your expenses

Eckel wrote a paragraph or two elaborating on each of his points, but I’m not sure that’s really necessary here. You’re all smart people, and you can figure out that making backups—particularly if you already have some kind of backup software and hardware—is cheaper than not making backups. Most of the time, it’s not even that much trouble.

Don’t forget to take the backup poll on the home page if you haven’t done so already.