It’s Time to Have That Talk – How to Explain Data Protection to Your Family!

It’s interesting to realize how much money and time we spend to protect our physical assets — our homes, furniture, cars and personal belongings. But many of us don’t invest in protection for our digital assets — photos, videos, important documents, contacts, and more.

For most of us, it’s difficult to reconcile these choices, especially given the fact that it is often impossible to replace your most high-value digital assets, such as photos and videos. Once you lose them, they are gone forever.

So why does it take a disaster for people to finally sta thinking about how to secure their digital assets in the same way that they take care of their physical ones?

Perhaps the reason is that the value of important digital assets is an emotional one, and not about basic needs like shelter, transportation, and clothing. We take for granted that our photos and videos are safe because they are always at our fingertips, and we don’t realize how easy it is to lose them.

Family members follow by example, and if you, as the head of household and part-time family IT manager, don’t demonstrate the importance of keeping your digital life safe, your spouse and children won’t either. I am a firm believer in the importance of backup, but I needed to convince my family as well, and I needed to find a way to explain the importance of backup to them!

I recently sat down with my family to discuss this very topic. I decided not to start the conversation talking about the photos, videos, and documents on our PCs or smartphones. Rather, I focused on other things I knew were important to them.

My son loves his bike and he is good at locking it up wherever he goes. I suggested that he should stop locking up his bike to see his reaction. His eyes widened in surprise. “Dad,” he said, “If I don’t lock up my bike, someone might steal it!”

“So what," I replied, "Why do you care if someone steals it?” “Because I love my bike and couldn’t live without it,” was his response.

I turned to my wife. She has a diamond necklace I bought for her for our wedding anniversary that she treasures. I asked her where she keeps it. “In the safe deposit box,” she replied. “We agreed that if I keep it here in the house, someone might steal it.”

“So what,” I replied, shrugging my shoulders. “Why do you care if someone steals it? It’s insured.” “I love that necklace. You gave it to me,” she replied.

So then I asked my wife if the photos she has of our family that are stored on her computer are just as precious to her as her necklace. “Of course,” she replied. “I can’t replace them. In some ways, they are probably more valuable.”

I turned to my son and asked him if the photos he stores on his smartphone are important to him. At the same time, I picked up his phone and said, “You probably don’t care about your photos. Let’s delete them.”

“No, no,” he yelled at me as he swiped the phone from my hand, looking incredulous. “These photos are important to me. I can’t replace them.”

“Ah ha,” I replied. “If your photos are so important to you, why don’t you protect them so you never lose them — like you protect your bike or your necklace?”

The response to my question was blank stares... The fact is that there are probably more ways to lose your photos, videos, music, and other important documents then there are ways to lose your bike or necklace. Your smartphone can be stolen, the hard drive on your PC can crash, your computer can get a virus, or you can accidentally delete something. The list goes on and on.

I could see that they never thought that these things could happen to them. My son and wife looked at each other, then looked at me. “You’re right Dad,” my son replied. “What can we do to be sure we don’t lose these things?”

“Backup your computer and smartphones,” I responded. “Let’s install Acronis True Image Cloud and I’ll show you how. Using the product’s online dashboard, I can be sure that we safeguard the data on all of our famliy's devices. Once we install and set up the software, there is virtually nothing else you need to do — it’s easy.”

Having this discussion wasn’t that challenging but it was eye-opening to me and to my family. We’re now protecting both our physical and digital assets – something everyone should do today.

Have you had the data protection talk with your family?

If you’re looking for a way to protect your family's digital assets, get a free trial of Acronis True Image Cloud today and see how easy it is to use!