Insure Your Digital Life Now — Before It's Too Late

People buy insurance to protect prized possessions — their cars, homes and even beloved pets. But the one valuable they consistently neglect to insure? Their digital data, including family photos, medical records and other personal details that would be tough to live without.

"Our digital lives are becoming more and more real, and subsequently, becoming more and more important to protect," writes Nat Maple, a senior vice president and general manager at Acronis, in Wired Innovation Insights. Maple identifies three reasons why people should buy digital insurance.

1. Don't underestimate the value of digital information: "There is tangible value to the information you have on your digital devices, especially when you consider the time and money it would take to replace and/or recover your data in the event of a hardware malfunction, hard drive crash, or theft. While it may be easier to put a price tag on your health, or the value of your vehicle, it’s also important to think about the price tag you would put on your 'digital self'— and to ensure you can retrieve that information quickly." 
2. You're not immune: "As the size of information we’re storing digitally continues to grow, the chance of loss increases in tandem. Your hard drive has a 50 percent chance of crashing after six years, so the era of only saving information to your computer’s hard drive is rapidly coming to a close."
3. Don't wait until it's too late: "Unfortunately, for most of today’s consumers, the idea of backing up their information will only occur to them once they’ve experienced some type of data loss. We’re at a point where the amount of information people store digitally is drastically larger than the amount they don’t."

h/t:  Wired Innovation insights. 

[Image via CanStock]