Have you looked at hard drive prices lately?  If you have not been in the market for a few months, you will get a nasty surprise when going to purchase one. In many cases drive prices have doubled from six months ago.

The main reason for this is that the worst flooding in decades hit Thailand where most of the worlds drive manufacturers have their factories. Western Digital announced that 75% of production was affected.  This has caused prices to rise as demand for drives have been ever increasing, particularly by cloud services to hold increasing amounts of business and consumer data.

What this means for consumers and small business looking to purchase additional storage is increased costs drives. However this should not be an excuse to not do a backup.  The price of your data is far more then the price of a drive.  There are other options including cloud backup and making another backup to another computer in the same home or office.

Do remember the importance of an offsite backup Whether you use a removable hard drive that you physically take offsite or you use a cloud service, you must have a backup away from the primary computer in case of physical disaster or theft.