In today's digital age, I believe lots and lots of people will lose a lot of valuable information like photos because they don't have a good understanding of what backing up means.
I've warned my friend who is computer illiterate that he is risking losing his childrens' complete photo collection for their entire lives because he is only keeping a single copy of his data on his hard drive. This is probably the situation with millions of people in the US alone, and when that hard drive failure event happens, which will happen, then they will lose everything.
This is becoming even more important with SSDs. I used to do a lot of data recovery, and photos were of course a very common type of data that customers wanted to recover.
If the drive was spinning, I could usually recover most of the data. Even if the drive was completely dead, there was still some chance at recovery of I had the correct logic board, and for a hefty price I could send it out to a company with more resources to get the platters spinning again.
SSDs can be much harder recover from, since you need information stored in the controller to map out the data, and many consumer level hard drives brick themselves on failure to prevent silent data corruption.
Would it have been more effective to just provide him with a list of stuff - a choice of two drives; a choice of two softwares (with really easy URLs to buy and download) and instructions for using and testing.
I bought him a new hard drive, copied the photos over and gave him instructions on how to do it. He hasn't bothered to update his backup once, and it's been about 5 years and his photo collection has only grown.
I'm thinking of buying a CrashPlan Business account (my corp uses the Enterprise version) for my family for this reason. I set them up with TimeMachine, but even plugging in a USB drive has proven to be too much to remember.
I've warned my friend who is computer illiterate that he is risking losing his childrens' complete photo collection for their entire lives because he is only keeping a single copy of his data on his hard drive. This is probably the situation with millions of people in the US alone, and when that hard drive failure event happens, which will happen, then they will lose everything.