This holiday season, iPods, digital cameras, and other digital media players are expected to dominate the consumer electronics holiday gift market. With iTunes selling over 1.5 billion songs so far (including 1 million videos per week) and digital camera sales expected to top the 26 million mark, there’s a lot of digital content on laptops and desktops that consumers spent significant time, energy and money choosing, purchasing, capturing, downloading and organizing.

Clearly, content is king and the driving force behind why these portable devices are so popular. Unfortunately, this valuable data is in serious jeopardy because, in most cases, it is not properly backed up. Having your digital music collection on both your iPod and your computer is great, but relying on the iPod as a backup is a mistake. Since portable music players often take a beating, they are more prone to data loss than the main computer.

The place where consumers need to protect their data is on their home computers, since there’s a very good chance the hard drive on that computer will fail; a recent survey showed over 50% of consumers have lost data at some point, and these days it is pretty common that music and pictures are part of that data loss. So if it does fail, without significant backups in place, all of that time and money spent on music along with your priceless digital memories will be lost.

Don’t let a data disaster ruin your holiday gift - follow these easy steps from Ontrack Data Recovery to ensure data is as safe as it can be - and of course, if the worst case happens, you can always turn to data recovery:

• Make regular backups of all of your important data - and don’t forget the music and photos. A recent study indicated that the average digital music collection includes more than 1,000 songs. At $0.99 a song, that’s a significant investment that should be protected.
• External hard drives make the process a snap - CDs and DVDs still work well for backups, but external hard drives make the process incredibly fast, easy and even affordable. You can get a 250 GB drive for under $100 - more than enough to handle the average digital music collection and photo albums.
• Store the backups away from the main computer - once you get all of your precious digital content backed up, make sure to store those backups in an alternate location away from the main computer. This protects the data in the event that something tragic happens (fire or flood) to the room where the computer sits.
• If your digital content is lost there’s always hope. Ontrack Data Recovery, the leading data recovery company in the industry, are experts at saving the data off any hard drive and can actually recover from the digital device itself.

Tags: data, recovery, ontrack, itunes, ipod, external hard drive, backup, back up