Solution #1 — Backing up your digital data is a personal problem. Of course, I don’t mean that in the way we often think about embarrassing, socially awkward, problems that no one else is able to help you solve. I just mean each person will have different needs and requirements. My backup plan would likely be complete overkill for you, yours might be too expensive for me. It is fairly obvious that the backup hardware and software for a single person with one computer would be much different from the tools a family with a handful of computers, smartphones, tablets might need. Not to mention a small business owner whose mission critical data and application are the livelihood of the people he or she employes.
I suppose we all know that we should be backing up our data, but more problems begin to present themselves when you start to consider what data you want to backup, what type of digital disaster you may need to recover from, and how fast you need to make that recovery.
- Would you treat irreplaceable pictures of your wedding or your young children the same as last weeks email or text messages from your friends?
- What about your digital music or movie collection compared to last year’s financial or tax records?
- Could you recover from your own mistake of accidentally deleting a file?
- Could you recover if your house burned to the ground?
- Could you wait weeks, days, or only hours to recover all your files?
- How much do you think all of this is going to cost?
I’ll come back to backups often, but let me give you just a few ideas to start.
- Please have some kind of backup. Have some second place outside of your main computer where your important files are stored.
- Have a backup in a different location (often called an off-site backup).
- Have a backup you don’t have to remember, but is in some way automatic.
- Test your system to make sure you can actually get things back from your backup.
More later…