Some companies could survive for several days, or even a few weeks, without all of their data.
So you have hot spares, hot backup sites, backups for your backups, and people monitoring everything day and night. If you're an airline, you can't afford any downtime at all.
#MANUAL UNINSTALLATION OF ACRONIS TRUE IMAGE HOME 2009 FREE#
You can buy one of these today for about $100 (250GB Seagate Free Agent drives from NewEgg are $92 and you can find bare OEM 1TB disk drives for less than $100, too.) How Long Can You Wait? So you should also consider a local backup of some sort using an external USB hard drive. Because it's on-line, you need a high-speed Internet connection and, even with that, restoring data could take several days. For less than $5 per month, you can back up all the internal drives in your computer. I like the on-line backup service by Carbonite. And with programs such as Acronis True Image Home and services such as Carbonite, it can't be the complexity. So why do many people just whistle in the dark, hope for the best, and forget about backing up? It can't be the cost. It's not so much about protecting the hardware but about safeguarding the files you've stored on the machine. The same holds true for a firewall and a UPS unit.
Long ago, computers didn't need antivirus software, but now it would be foolish not to have it. But I wonder how many of these people would consider driving without insurance. Probably most computer owners still don't back up their data.