Tech Resolution #1: Thou Shalt Back up Your Work

If you ever want to know the value of backing up your work, ask someone – especially someone in business – who recently lost everything.

Backing up is one of those things that we all intend to do, but frighteningly few of us actually get around to. In fact, BackBlaze, one of the most respected names in backup, has conducted a survey over the past few years, and the findings are startling:

• only 6% of respondents back up daily
• 35% of computer owners have never backed up their data
• women are the most negligent when it comes to data backup.

Clearly, people are not understanding either the risk, or the consequences of lost data. Lost family photos are one thing; if you are in business, the average company (according to an Aberdeen research study) loses $163,674 in labor and revenue for each hour of downtime due to data loss. That is anything but insignificant.

For businesses, your backup needs might be more complex and require customization, which we at Digital Link are happy to help you with. But a great place to start is with a system of double backups:

1. a local backup. Simply, this can be an external hard drive or even a USB stick that you drag and drop files into. If your computer crashes, you can take that external hard drive and port the data you have stored within to another computer, and you are back up and running. No aneurysm needed!
2. an offsite backup. Local backups are great because they are so quick and convenient to use, and you always control access. But external hard drives have a life expectancy, and they can be dropped or broken, or damaged in a flood or a fire. Cloud storage (shared space in the ethers of the online world) or other offsite storage provide an additional layer of loss prevention. Although there can still be issues with data loss, it is relatively rare, and precisely why you have a local backup as well. Places like BackBlaze, or even something like Dropbox, can be a great place to start. You can even automate the backup so that you never even have to worry about it until you need it.

Maybe you have never backed up your data in your life (ACH!). Maybe you are one of the 93% who just don’t backup enough or in two places. Either way, 2018 is a great time to start.

So for your first Tech Resolution of 2018, can we make a hard plea for you to start backing up your work, daily, in two places? I promise you, alternate universe you – the one who loses all their customer contacts next month – would have thanked us.

Check out our next Tech Resolution: Thou Shalt Use Anti-Malware Software!