Happy International Backup Day!

You didn’t know that was today? That’s because every day is International Backup Day.

Think of it this way: “What happens if my hard drive fails?” is the wrong question. All hard drives fail.

The question is: When my hard drive fails, what will I do?

This is why you need to back up your stuff, ideally in more than one way. Your backups should be spread out both in space and in time.

Space: Local and offsite backups

It doesn’t do you much good to back up your computer to a portable hard drive if that gets stolen along with your computer. On the other hand, if all you have is a cloud backup, restoring your data can take a really long time. So you want both a local backup and an offsite/cloud backup.

Time: Multiple, frequent backups

If you get hit with ransomware, and then your system backs up the encrypted files, your backup won’t help you. You’ll need a backup

from the time before your files got encrypted. Since you aren’t always sure when that happened, you need multiple backups, several times a day, going back for at least a few days.

…OK, if that sounds like too much work, any backup at all is still way better than no backup. Just don’t leave the backup device connected to your computer all the time. Keep it somewhere else.

A few years back someone broke into my house and took our laptops…but they didn’t take our backups! We didn’t lose any files at all.

Think of it this way: How much is your stuff worth to you?

Thank you and take care!