There are 2 types of people; those who back-up their computers & those that’ve never had a hard drive fail. — Jacki Hollywood Brown, quoting Marc Brown
World Backup Day is March 31 — and wow, do we need the reminder. Tom Coughlin writes:
In various surveys (including some I have run) it seems 20-35% of respondents either don’t back up or don’t back up very frequently, leaving themselves vulnerable to data loss.Marc Brown is right; if you’ve ever had a hard drive fail, you’re probably very good about doing backups now. If you haven’t had a hard drive fail, it’s just a matter of time. Here’s the word from Lifehacker:
When your computer’s hard drive fails, it can be gut-wrenching. At best, maybe you lost a really important presentation you were working on. At worst, maybe you’ve lost every photo of your kid’s childhood. Sometimes, you can recover that data yourself — but often, it’s gone forever (unless you want to pay a lot of money to get it back).What's at stake? Davide De Vellis, who almost lost all this files, makes it clear:
Every hard drive fails one day. Backup service Backblaze says 50% fail after only four years. Save yourself the trouble and start backing up your computer now.
I thought of the impact of losing all of the work I done on the countless documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and oh my, all my contact lists.
Then it really hit me. I realized all of the personal stuff I have on my devices. Photos and videos of the most important people in my life. My family, some of which had recently passed. My nieces and nephews as they were growing up. All the time, and money, it had taken to download and organize my music collections.Personally, I do two types of computer backups. I use Crashplan for my automated cloud backups, and SuperDuper (a Mac-only program) for my backups to external hard drives. But there are lots of options; if you haven't done so already, please pick one and get your backups going!
And while we often talk about backing up our computers, please be sure to also backup your smartphone — so you’re covered if you lose yours, if it falls in the toilet, etc.
Related Posts:
Sleep Well at Night: Have a Good Backup Strategy
One More Reason You Need Computer Backups
Computer Backups: The Critical Step You May Be Missing
Photo: World Backup Day magnets
3 comments:
Jeri, How often do you back up your computer? I do back mine up but only once a month....
Sophie, the CrashPlan backups are continuous, so I'm always up-to-date there.
I usually do my SuperDuper backups at least once/month — and I always do one before leaving on vacation or before doing any major update to my computer.
I use Mac's Time Machine to doautomatic backup to a local external drive. Where I fall behind in the plan is swapping the external drives intermittently.
One other reason to back up - sometimes when re-organizing files, it can be easy to accidentally delete files and not realize it until after you've emptied the trash bin. Or if you have duplicate file names and later realize OOPS not the same file contents!
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