What’s your personal back up plan? Tuesday 31 March is World Backup Day
We’ve all heard stores of (or experienced) losing an important document due to the blue screen of death, losing precious photos due to a device dying, or even losing all files after falling victim to malware or ransomware.
The only way to protect yourself against valuable data loss in situations like this (which could happen to anyone – even IT professionals!) is through regular backups.
This World Backup Day (31st March), we encourage you to consider your personal backup plan, and backup any files that need to be.
When considering your personal backup plan, think about all your devices – your laptop, mobile phone, etc.
Now think about the different files these devices hold. How important are the files? How often are these files added to (e.g. work files that are updated regularly, versus old photos).
Based on these considerations:
- Determine how often files should be backed up. Daily, weekly, monthly, yearly?
- Decide where files should be backed up. This could include an online backup (e.g. OneDrive, Google Drive, iCloud, Dropbox), and an offline backup (e.g. external hard drive). Online backups are good in situations where the files need to be backed up regularly, however an offline backup is valuable as it will help ensure a ‘hard’ copy.
Some types of files may be set to back up automatically – e.g. photos on your smartphone may automatically sync to iCloud or Google Photos. You’ll need to identify what is being automatically backed up (and is this backup alone enough?), what isn’t being automatically backed up, where you can set up automatic backups, where you need to consider manually backing up, how often you want to do an offline backup, and so on.
