5 Things You’re Probably Doing to Compromise Your Data

If your computer crashes and you lose important data, your first instinct is probably to blame someone else. A cybercriminal who created a virus that infected your machine. Your friend who sent you an email that contained malware. Someone else in your house who didn’t follow the proper process for saving and shutting down the computer.

While it’s easy to blame others for your computer issues, in many cases, the blame for lost data falls squarely on your shoulders. That’s right: There’s a pretty good chance things you are doing on your machine, and how you are saving and managing your data, are putting your files at risk for loss or damage. And while software can help you retrieve data in the event of a hard drive failure, preventing data loss in the first place requires avoiding these five common behaviors.

Not Updating Important Programs

If you are working on a Windows-based PC, getting the notification an update is necessary and you need to restart the machine can be annoying. You may be tempted to click the button and indefinitelypostpone the update, but by doing so, you could make yourself vulnerable to malware and hackers who want to steal who your data and damage your drives. It’s important to install security patches and updates to your operating system and programs as soon as they are available; double-check your antivirus software updates in real time as well. If you don’t use your computer for a few days, run a check for updates when you turn it on for the first time, before you start working. Because vulnerabilities are discovered and patched nearly every day, even skipping a few days can create a security risk.

Neglecting to Backup Data

While you can often recover important data after a drive failure using recovery software, you can save a lot of anxiety and reduce your downtime by performing regular backups. And while almost 95 percent of people admit backups are important, almost 90 percent of home computer users never back up their data. Imagine losing the photos of your child’s first year forever after your computer crashes. Simply saving your data to an external drive or cloud storage provider, a process that takes less than an hour, can prevent that.

Incorrectly Saving Files

Someone sends you a file to work on. You open it, spend hours making changes and perfecting it, and then hit “Save” and close the file. But when you go to return it, the file is nowhere to be found. You could spend hours searching every drive on your machine, even the hidden or “ghost” drives that aren’t generally accessible, but if you don’t correctlysave your files, they may never be retrievable. Before you save any file, pay close attention to where you’re saving it and the file name. Saving a new file with the same name as another one, for example, could overwrite the first file and destroy it forever, a simple error that could cause hours of wasted work.

Saving Files in the Wrong Place

Again, paying attention to where you save your files is important, making it easier for you to find them later. However, most experts point out that you should not save everything to your computer’s hard drive – even though the majority of users do just that. Saving everything to your internal drive not only slows down your machine as your data east up memory, it also increases the chances that your files will be lost should something happen to the drive. Consider the hard drive a temporary storage site; save everything to a secondary or external drive to save space and protect your data.

No Plan for Recovery

Effectively protecting the data on your computer requires having a plan if something goes wrong. When your computer crashes and you don’t have a plan, you could easily spend hours panicking and desperately looking for a solution. Keep a hard copy of your plan in an accessible location. At minimum, your plan should include the numbers for technical support for your computer, the disks or key codes to important programs and instructions for a data recovery program. If you need to get more information about data recovery, do it before disaster strikes and know which vendor you plan to use. With a plan, your recovery should be quick and relatively painless.

No one likes to hear that they are the cause of a problem, but in this case, there’s a good chance what you’re doing is putting your data in danger. Update your software, save your files properly and have a plan, and you should not experience a significant data loss.