There are far too many stories of irreplaceable pictures, videos, documents, and application data being lost due to hardware failure, viruses, or user error. Techies will say the following until we are blue in the face – everyone must have an automated backup solution, even on personal home computers. All too often, we all think about backing up our data after a disaster. At that point, it is typically too late to recover anything useful, and all parties involved become frustrated at the loss.
In this post, I make another plea for setting up automated backups on your personal computers. There are so many options and solutions available. Depending on the amount (size) of the data that needs to be backed up, some of the potential solutions will cost you nothing.
External Hard Drive
External hard drives come in several different configurations, but I highly recommend one with built in redundancy or fail-over. As an example, the <pick from Amazon> offers these crucial features via RAID technology. The bottom line is if one of the drives fails, all of your data remains intact on the fail-over drive.
Dropbox
As a potentially free option, Dropbox offers 5GB of storage for all of your personal data, as well as nearly seamless integration with both Windows and OS X, as your Dropbox folder simply shows up as another folder on your computer.
Google Drive
Google Drive requires you to have a free Google account and works similarly to Dropbox. Users get 20GB of storage space with this option.
Fully Automated Hosted Services
There are many available options in the automated, hosted services space. My personal favorite is BackBlaze. The installation and configuration could not be easier. You get unlimited storage, reports, and easy management to restore files when necessary.
Ultimately, I highly suggest implementing at least two of these, or other, options to better ensure the safety of your data. In this digital age, we must be proactive about backing up our important data, or it could potentially be lost forever.