Since I was in second grade, I remember playing with computers. By the time I was in fourth grade, a friend’s father, who worked for AT&T had a 286 computer running DOS that we played very basic games on and another friend’s father who worked for Air Products had an Apple IIe. These computers from the mid 80’s cost a small fortune and barely came with any hard drive space, by that I mean they came with maybe 8mb, not GB of space. Most computers had limited uses back then and saving your data wasn’t usually that important. Within a few short years, that all changed for every one of us.

The history of backup website covers how data storage came to be, starting in 1951 with punch cards, all the way through today’s high speed, networked attached storage devices.

By today’s standards, we as consumers backup things all the time without much thought to spending insane amounts of money on storage, like in the 80’s when a 5 pack of floppy disks costs $20. Blank DVD disks usually cost less than 20 cents a piece, CD-R’s are even less!

Understanding the evolution of data backup can kind of give a forecast to the future of what we will need. Most home computers today come with 250GB or larger hard drives, average consumers are filling them faster than ever with digital pictures, financial spreadsheets and home digital movies. Everyone loves the storage space until it goes splat.

Working in the IT industry now has me branded as a computer geek for all my friends. When their hardware goes south, they call me to fix it. First thing I ask them is if they have anything backed up, the usual answer is no. Had they spent a little bit of time and backed up their data, and understood why it was important, they wouldn’t be in such a bad situation. I’ve even written about how backing up data just got easier!

Disclaimer: This is a sponsored review

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