If you’ve ever had a device crash, taking all your data with it, you know how painful the experience can be. When that happens on a large scale, the effects can be devastating. Data loss costs the average business $586,000 a year, and that doesn't address the personal, emotional and cultural costs of losing everything from financial data to great works of art. The worst part? It can easily be avoided.

In 2010, IDC forecasted that by 2014, 70 percent of all servers would become virtual. That prediction has largely come to bear, as Gartner estimates that Windows is now 60 to 70 percent virtualized, with Linux about 35 to 45 percent there. Moreover, between the legacy physical systems in place, the decline in server shipments and the large proportion of virtualized environments, hardly any system shipped today is not virtual.

It’s time for a new year and a fresh start. In 2014, why not resolve to take better care of your data? As you begin to use any new devices you may have received for the holidays and continue to depend on your old ones, how you store and protect your data is important. Follow these three tips and tricks from Acronis to extend your devices’ lifecycles and get the most out of your technology.

This time of year, everyone’s starting to think about how to shed the extra baggage incurred by drinking too much eggnog and eating too much pie. But there’s another area prone to bloat that we should all be thinking about targeting: our devices.