Please, please, please backup

Once you have been using your computer for even a few weeks the data on it becomes the most valuable part of your computer. If your computer fails, is stolen or you spill a cup of coffee on your laptop the actual hardware is easily replaced; however, unless you have a copy of the data this is lost for ever so please, please, please back it up.

All the time people are telling me of distressing times when they have lost data including emails, photos, presentations, home videos. Nowadays there are very afffordable ways of taking a copies of your data and actually you do not even need to remember to do it any more.

There are a number of different ways of doing this and for the home owner or small business this normally comes down to one of two ways:

1. Manually remembering to backing up a copy to an external hard drive or to backup tapes
2. Automatically backup your data up offsite each day

The 2 key downsides to the first method is that it is manual and you have to remember to take the copy of the data each day, week, month and then most times people leave the hard drive or tapes in the same building as their computers. This is not much good if there is a flood, burglary etc, your copy is lost as well. Therefore if you are going to manually backup to say an external hard drive, please do a second one and put a copy in a friends house and update it every month. The other downside is that most people do not encrypt their data, so if the hard drive/tapes are lost or stolen then anyone can access the data.

Nowadays it is easy to have your data backed up offsite, automatically and securely, i.e. encrypted. The main advantage of backing up offsite is that you do not have to remember to do it, it occurs automatically everyday. The other added advantage that you can actually access it at anytime if you have to, for example on a business trip and you wanted to see a document on your desktop computer.

Philip
Customer Service Director, zuuMedia