There are many reasons why you prefer a laptop over a desktop PC, and one of them is mobility.  Being able to bring your laptop anywhere you wish is indeed a fantastic benefit.  You’re no longer confined to the workplace to do your tasks.  With a laptop, you can bring your work with you, wherever you want to go, wherever in the world you choose to be.

Mobility, however, can expose the laptop to some unavoidable dangers.  For starters, since you will be carrying your laptop from place to place, the chances of dropping the same and breaking it are higher.  Also, because your laptop will experience many locales, it will be exposed to the elements and this can expedite the process of wear and tear.

Then there’s the matter of data loss.  Believe it or not, 61% of laptop accidents are related to lost data.  Data recovery has become a very lucrative service because of this rather alarming statistic.

Your laptop has become your best friend, as well as your travel buddy?

Here are 5 tips that will help your laptop avoid data loss during its time on the road.

1. Before you start your travel, synch your laptop with your PC.  Make sure that the important files are likewise saved on you desktop’s hard drive.  Remember the adage “an ounce of prevention is worth more than a pound of cure?”  It perfectly applies here.

2. Always use reliable backup devices.  Whether it’s a USB drive or a writable media or even a floppy, having your important documents saved on a backup device will save you a world of problems in the event that data loss does happen.  Computer enthusiasts follow 3 cardinal rules when it comes to data preservation: backup, backup, backup.

3. Be aware of battery life.  Most data are lost because the laptop dies down in the middle of a process.  Believe it or not, this mishap seems to happen a lot just before a document is saved… talk about a case of divine comedy!  Knowing when your laptop will run out of power is critical in being able to preserve data in progress.

4. Use protective gears.  A number of cases of data loss are also attributed to hardware failure caused by physical breakage of the laptop itself.  Drop a laptop, for example, and you’d risk permanent damage on the system, and a permanent loss of data as well.  Keeping your laptop protected from such accidents will help you protect your data too.

5. Always set a restore point.  Data loss can also be experienced because of corruption in the laptop’s system.  A virus, or any other form of malware, can lead to chaos, such as deleted files, compromised information, and broken registries.  How can you recover data in such a case?  Removing the harmful file can salvage the system as well as the files which were left untouched.  But if the said files were already compromised, the only way to save them is by performing a system restore.  Hence, it is very important to always set a restore point when the files you need have already been updated.

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