We have all had it happen to us at some stage. The phone was left on the roof of the car when you pulled out of the driveway and gets run-over. A cup of coffee is spilled all through your laptop. A virus infects your computer, wiping all your files. With World Backup Day coming up this Friday (March 31st), I thought it was a great opportunity to remind everyone why you need to backup your data.
Firstly, what is a backup? Backups are digital copies of your most important files. These could be emails, documents, spreadsheets, photos, or anything else that is stored on a device. Our devices contain valuable personal and business information, but these devices could be lost, destroyed, or otherwise damaged, meaning that this data could be lost.
Having backups means that you can restore your files if something goes wrong. Without a backup, recovering data loss due to hardware failure, theft, accidental damage, or a virus, can be a difficult, costly, and even sometimes impossible exercise.
So now we have an understanding of why we should back up our data, how can we do a backup?
There are two types of backups that can be made, Local and Remote.
Local backups involve making copies of your data onto a CD/DVD/Blu-Ray, USB drive, portable hard drive, or even a local NAS. These are great for making a backup and putting it away in a safe and secure location, only getting them out if needed.
Remote backups usually involve the cloud and are done through OneDrive, iCloud, Google Drive or similar products. These provide file and folder synchronisation and are ideal if you are switching between multiple devices and want access to your data from all of them. There are also dedicated online backup providers such as Backblaze and CrashPlan which offer archiving services.
Each of these backup types have their advantages and disadvantages. It is important to do your research on each to decide which will work best for you.
Ideally, you should follow a 3-2-1 backup plan for your data:
- 3 copies of your data in,
- 2 different locations or 2 different media types (ie CD & hard drive),
- 1 of which is off-site (remote)
Once your backups are created, don’t just forget about them until you need them. They need to be tested to make sure that you can actually recover the data from them. It has been known to happen that a backup process will show as completed, however no data has actually been copied anywhere, and 6 months later when the system failed, none of the backups from that time worked. In this case, the business was able to recover from this potential loss of data as they still had the relevant paperwork, however, the cost involved in re-entering 6 months’ worth of financial data and other business information far outweighed the cost of taking 5 minutes once a month to perform a recovery test.
Your testing should also take into account time. Data that was written to a CD 10 or 15 years ago, may no longer be readable due to physical changes in the disc over that time, or simply because you no longer have a device with an optical drive. If you still need access to these older backups, get in touch with a service provider who can assist you in transferring the data to newer mediums.
Following this plan helps to ensure that if the worst happens, your valuable data can be recovered with minimal cost in time, effort, and heartache.