How Much is Your data worth?
I was reading this article from MSN entitled Oops! Techie wipes out $38 billion fund. A quote from the article is “Perhaps you know that sinking feeling when a single keystroke accidentally destroys hours of work. Now imagine wiping out a disk drive containing an account worth $38 billion.” So I got to thinking and about how much is my data really worth.
I am not talking about business data I am talking about personal data and the information on my hard drive. Those of you who do business with me know my standard quote is “There is almost no such thing as having to much protection for your data. The servers may cost you 15k but the data is worth millions.”
So I have decided to see what my own personal data is worth not only to me but in real $$$. I have pretty much grown up in the technology age, in High School and College I was typing everything and everything was being saved for future use (you never know when you will need a three page paper on Shakespeare) and it has countless hours invested in this information. Fortunately I purged my old data but if I were still in school this would be almost priceless.
Back to reality here:
On my PC I have about 3 years of customer invoices and accounting records - I have had to pay an accounting firm a while back to straighten out a tax issue for me and based on their invoice it would be about $3500 to recreate most of the data from hard copy.
I also have 6 years of digital travel photos - I have uploaded most of them to flickr but the originals are priceless. But if I HAD to put a price on them - one trip to Western Europe for viting 5 countries - $3500, one trip to Eastern Europe $2900, two trips to South Africa $7500, one trip to China and Hong Kong $3500. So the images are worth $17400 just to go back to the places to retake the photos, but the memories are irreplaceable.
Emails and letters to my wife before we were married - priceless.
Songs that are loaded into iTunes from a CD that I no longer have.
Tax returns - ask Uncle Sam
Passwords to about 50 web sites that are just saved as cookies - I have an account where?
Spreadsheets and business plans - this could be a million bucks just sitting there.
Rants and Raves. $0.02
I estimate that I would suffer about $20,000 in replacement value and about $1950 in actual damages if my hard drive died..
I am not even going to include software and aggravation costs nor the time it would take to set my machine back up again the way that I like it.
I urge you to backup your data. There are so many easy ways to do this: burn a CD/DVD, use an external Hard Drive, USB stick, another machine, tape backup, floppy disks or an online backup service.
Bottom line backup your data. Its cheaper than you think.
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