After the Storm Comes a Rainbow
If you've ever had a computer device unexpectedly fail on you, you know how it feels - like a flash flood, taking you by surprise and washing away everything you need.
Lets say, you have an external hard drive which stopped. Completely. Unexpectedly.
Did you had backups of that data? Do you make backups of your data regularly?
Here are some recommendations to help you from feeling the pain of a failed hard drive:
If you've ever had a computer device unexpectedly fail on you, you know how it feels - like a flash flood, taking you by surprise and washing away everything you need.
Lets say, you have an external hard drive which stopped. Completely. Unexpectedly.
Did you had backups of that data? Do you make backups of your data regularly?
Here are some recommendations to help you from feeling the pain of a failed hard drive:
- Invest in an external backup drive for storing your backups. You can see some good guidance here.
- For data that is especially valuable (income tax data, photos, business data), make another copy on a different external drive and store at a different, secure location, such as a bank safety deposit box.
- Back up your email at least once a week; more often if you depend on it for business and would be lost without it.
- Most external hard drives can be configured to automatically make backups at specified intervals; look for external hard drives with these capabilities.
- If personal information is on your backup drive, encrypt it!
- If you want to use a cloud service to store your backups, make sure they will encrypt your data, and that they have terms of service that will allow you ample time to remove your data, completely, if there is ever the need.
- Regularly test backups to ensure the backup data is actually good.
No comments:
Post a Comment