Love your laptop - Five tips for protecting your data

• Handle with Care – Because laptops are portable, many people treat them like they are indestructible. It’s important to remember that an extremely fragile hard drive is inside your laptop and that drive can be knocked out of alignment with even a short drop or light jostling. You should keep your laptop flat and motionless when it is running since any vibrations can cause hard drive problems. Also, use a padded laptop bag when traveling.
• Keep it Clean – Another problem caused by the portability of laptops is that people tend to use/store them in unclean environments. Whether it’s spilling a beverage on the keyboard while multi-tasking, stacking papers or other items on top while it’s docked, or storing the laptop in a dusty corner when not in use – people cause a lot of problems for their data simply by where they take it and how it’s stored. You can keep your laptop functioning normally by avoiding these scenarios and only using it in clean, dry areas.
• Privacy Please – Part of protecting the data on your laptop involves making sure it is secure. Confirm that your laptop hard drive is password protected so in the unfortunate event that you lose the hardware, the sensitive data on the machine won’t be compromised.
• Watch your Back – One of the most common mistakes that people make with laptops is a failure to make sufficient backups of important documents. Backups tend to be made more regularly on desktop computers as part of a regular process. If a laptop is your primary computer, it should be put on the backup schedule as well.
• Trust the Pros – If your laptop is making strange noises or refuses to boot up properly, don’t forget the option of a professional recovery service. Data recovery is performed on thousands of laptops every year and professional data recovery providers are experts at saving the data off of laptop drives. If your data is valuable, it pays to search for a reputable recovery company and attempt recovery.

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