If you store important data on your computer, you should have a backup to ensure you aren’t relying on a single copy. This article explains why two backups might actually be a better idea.
How many computer data backups do you have? If you’re like many people you may not have any at all - despite the number of articles, blog posts and advice pages online and in magazines that reveal how important they are.
Think about this for a moment and you’ll see how true it is. Imagine you have hundreds of family photos on your computer hard drive and you don’t have any backups of them. What would you do if your computer died and your photos were inaccessible - possibly gone forever?
online backup
Here’s another example. Let’s say you work from home and you have information and work for clients on your computer. What would you do if you got up in the morning and discovered your computer didn’t work? You may have lost hours worth of work that you couldn’t get back - not to mention the potential goodwill of your clients, and the possibility of losing out on future business.
As you can see, backups are important. They help to protect against data loss, which, while inconvenient and frustrating, doesn’t have to be a big drama - not if you don’t have backups to protect you.
What is the best approach to take with backups?
Ideally you should have a minimum of two backups. The first one should be an external hard drive on your desk, and another one to a remote location. This ticks all the boxes when it comes to protecting your data. If the hard drive on your computer fails, you have the external hard drive as a backup (and vice versa). However, this plan wouldn’t save your data if you were unlucky enough to experience a fire in your home. In this case you could lose all your data, even though you’d made a copy.
This is why it is recommended to have another copy stored somewhere else. The best solution is to find a storage service in the cloud that allows you to backup your data to a remote location. This is getting more popular all the time, and many services exist that provide you with a decent amount of data storage space free of charge.
What should you do if it’s too late to put these measures in place?
Unfortunately, while the above steps are the ideal way to protect your data, some people won’t think of taking them until it is too late. If you are in this situation now, your best bet will be to seek help in retrieving as much of your ‘lost data’ as possible. You may find you haven’t lost it after all.