With mostly all our personal information now being held on digital devices, whether it be laptops, phones or tablets, more than ever it is important not just to protect these devices with a good all round antivirus package, it is also essential to ‘back up’ or ‘save’ your data.
Phones can break or be stolen, the same for tablets. Laptops can contract viruses and make impossible to retrieve your personal data.
Have you ever considered what you would do if you phone broke or was stolen? All that personal info like phone/email contacts, addresses, photos, would be lost to you, unless you were smart enough to ‘save’ this information.
Here are a few examples of things that can commonly happen for you to lose your data:
- Hard drives fail
- Electrical power outages corrupt files
- Viruses wipe data
- Ransomware attacks happen
- Theft, physical damage to the device and accidental formatting of device.
What information should you backup?
In most cases, it is better to backup files and folders that see most traffic. Here is a basic list of the most common files to back up.
- Documents
- Emails
- Music
- Pictures
- Videos
- Phone Contacts
What are the options for backing up?
This depends on the amount of storage you will need:
Cloud storage
Backing up in cloud storage has many advantages. The data you want stored is encrypted and transferred to a high security data centre. This is a ‘greener’ option. All files are fully backed up with no user intervention. The files are easy to access from any location. In case of a natural disaster like a fire or a flood, all your data is safely stored remotely. A good antivirus security package like the Norton 360 Range comes with cloud back up.
External hard drives
These are physical devices that store all your information. The latest models of external hard drives come with variable storage and have exceptional features like high-speed access to files and warranties. You can even find one to match the décor of your room!
Flash/Memory/USB Sticks.
These can have advantages and disadvantages. Some of the advantages are that they are very portable, and they come with plenty of storage capacity. They lack moving parts like traditional hard drive disks, so have increased durability. The downsides are that they have a limited number of write and erase cycles before failing. Smaller size devices are easy to lose.
When should you Back up?
The answer to that is NOW! You never know when you may lose your files. It’s better to backup files on a daily basis. This is one of the advantages of having an online ‘cloud back up, they are configured to immediately sync files as they are saved. Get in a regular habit of ‘saving’ your data at regular intervals.
As a part of good cyber habits, make backing up an important part of your digital life.