We increasingly trust technology to look after all the important memories in our lives. Your precious baby videos, financial documents, love letters, business emails and wedding photos. Think about what you'd lose if these were erased forever.
What is backing up? Basically, it's making copies of all the important information that you have to ensure that it won't ever be lost or damaged. It's not as hard as it sounds - in fact, it's really simple!
You might think your computer, phone or tablet is pretty reliable, but in reality, it's not. Everything (yes, everything) fails, and once it does, all the important information you've stored on that device can be destroyed. In fact, it's not a question of if a piece of technology will fail - it's when.
More than 60 million computers will fail worldwide in 2013. Only 1 in 4 people back up their information regularly - that's roughly 45 million times this year where files will be lost forever. Even worse - 113 cell phones are lost or stolen every minute in the United States alone. That's hundreds of photos, conversations, calendars and more, gone in an instant.
It's important to be ready. That's why we created World Backup Day - to show you how to prepare for the inevitable. We'll help you to devise a plan to store your precious memories and information in a safe location. Because there's nothing worse than losing something important to you.
Want to know more? Check out our Tumblr for more interesting posts!
Backing up is easy. Once set up, your data should be backing up automatically. You just need to check every once in a while to make sure your backups actually work. There are three main types of backup solutions:
Local Backup
Every week, copy your most important files onto an external hard drive next to your desk, in your closet, or any other place where you can easily retrieve it.
You can even use Windows Backup (or Time Machine, if you have a Mac) to do this automatically!
Offsite Backup
Another automatic backup or an external hard drive that's stashed at another location, such as a bank vault, friend's house or even in a data center in another state. This protects your backup in case of theft, natural disaster or simple hardware failure.
Cloud backup
Similar to an offsite backup, this involves simply installing a small app on your computer to instantly and automatically copy your files to the internet. This makes multiple copies of your files at various places around the world, making it hard to lose any of your files.
It's super simple and done instantly - you barely need to do anything! However, your backups can be a little bit of a pain to retrieve though (it's a lot of stuff you have to download!) so having this option in conjunction with one of the above is a good, secure plan.
Things to backup
- Computer
- Laptop
- Phone
- iPod
- Tablet
- Other electronic devices
- Photos and videos on social networks
- and other online services.
Ways they can fail...and lose your data.
- Theft
- Hardware failure
- Natural disaster
- Alien invasion
- Obsolete file formats
- You forgot where you put it (really. it happens!)
Remember, always have a backup to back up your backup!
Check out our Tumblr for more guides and info leading up to March 31st!
