Regardless of whether you are a business user, a college student or just a general computer user, backing up your data is extremely important.
Despite the importance of backing up your data and the fact that it is obvious to some people, it is not obvious to others. In fact, there are really two types of people when it comes to computers and data backup:
- Those who have lost data
- Those who are going to lose data
If you are the former then you almost definitely will already be using a backup program – the reason is because if you have ever lost your data that’s when you realise how important your data was, and still is and thus how important it is to have a good backup system in place.
If you have not already lost data before then you are falling into the second category – it’s quite likely that you have never considered that you should back up your data, it’s probably never occurred to you that you could lose your data and as a result, data backup isn’t something you have really thought about.
Well if you are in that category, you are going to lose your data at some point – unless you take backup seriously.
Types of data to back up
For business users it’s normally easy to appreciate what type of thing you should be backing up – business users often have very important documents to back up as well as email, invoices, accounting software and other business related digital files.
For home users its sometimes less apparent what you should be backing up. The common items for a home user would be photos – they are always extremely important to home users. Pictures, documents and also email, especially if you use a desktop email program like outlook.
Cloud backup solutions
Once you have a good idea of what needs backing up, you need to find an actual backup solution. Whilst hard drives used to be a very good solution – one of the most popular, easiest to set up and cheapest ways to back up your data, that is no longer the case.
External hard drives are still most people’s first thought when they start thinking about data backup, but they do actually have some major flaws.
Firstly, they are fairly expensive – with the amount of data that most users have today, you need a large capacity external drive which come at a price, and then of course you need speed to back the data up quickly, that also comes at a cost.
Aside from the cost, external hard drives aren’t as durable as you might think and they do often break down – which makes using them as a backup device not that great an idea.
Lastly and most importantly, they are a physical device that needs to be stored somewhere – and more often than not it will end up being stored with the device that you have backed up (ie your PC or laptop) this also makes for a pretty poor backup device, simply because any major incident affecting your PC or laptop (theft, power surge, fire, flooding) is likely to affect the backup device as well rendering it useless.
Cloud backup
That’s where cloud backup comes in – there are now lots of services out there that can provide fully automated, offsite backup storage for your important files the way that they work is to install a small piece of software on your PC or laptop which after an initial configuration wizard will automatically back up all of your files on a regular basis – sometimes even in real-time. These services are normally fast because they only back up changed files.
Got Backup is one such cloud based backup service that is soon to be launched. In fact at the time of writing this article, there is just under 10 days until product launch.
You can sign up here ready for the launch date, and if you browse the site you can also sign up as an affiliate in which case you will actually receive a large commission on anyone that signs up through you.
Remember, take yourself out of that statistical group of people who are just waiting to lose their data, and be one of those people who have a solid backup plan in place.
