Data loss. We all think we're immune from it, yet it's happened to a lot of us. The precious pictures of our family and those important financial records we need will never be lost, right? I'm sure many of you have suffered at least minimal data loss due to hard drive failure or accidental deletion. We all know we should be backing up our data, but I'm willing to take a gamble and say that most of us are not doing an adequate job.
The best rule of thumb to follow if you want to protect your data from corruption, hardware failure, or accidental deletion is to implement the 3-2-1 backup rule. A description of the rule follows below.
3 – A copy of important files needs to exist in three different places. This can be accomplished by creating two copies of your data and finding two other places to keep the additional copies. Assuming you wanted to keep the original copy of the file on your computer, the second copy could be placed on an external drive, and a third copy on a burned DVD or at a cloud-based backup service, etc. Three copies of the data in three spots.
2 – Backed-up files need to be on at least two different kinds of media. Examples of common media types are: hard drives, optical media (DVD/CD), and usb memory sticks.
1 – At least one copy of your backed-up data needs to be maintained off-site. This means in an entirely different physical location. For example, if your primary backup exists at home, you could keep an off-site copy in a locked desk drawer at your office, or maybe at a relatives house. Cloud-based backup solutions offer a great solution for off-site backups as the servers that contain your data may be in a different city or state, and often that is redundantly and securely backed up in multiple locations as well. Think about it. Natural disasters and tragedies happen and are unpredictable. If all of your backed-up data is in your home and there is a fire or flood, you run the risk of losing everything.
Types of backup media
- DVD's CD's
- If your using DVD's, I recommend picking up a name brand like Sony or Memorex. I've had good luck with them. Store brands have not performed as well in my opinion. Don't skimp on quality. This is your important data after all!
- External Hard Drives
- Prices have been drastically falling on hard drive storage for quite a while, and its an affordable way to backup large amounts of data. For around $100, you can find a great external hard drive that will give you a terabyte or more of storage. I have a Seagate firewire terabyte external hard drive and it has performed very well. Western Digital also makes drives I have used and liked in the past.
- USB Flash Memory Drives
- The small form-factor and convenience of USB Flash drives, or thumbdrives as they are sometimes called have become more affordable and they are easy to use. The only drawback to these devices is that typically they are more expensive per MB than hard drive storage. I use thumbdrives for small collections of data that I move between location frequently. Although I do not use them for backing-up data, they are a solid choice for that chore as well. Once again, I recommend sticking to a name brand. I've had several cheap off-brand drives fail on me in the past. Don't make this mistake. Sandisk is my favorite manufacturer of usb thumbdrives.
- Cloud-based services
- Although cloud-based services use hard drives to store backup copies of your data, the benefit is that they are off-site in remote locations. They also make backups of your backed-up data. If they lose a hard drive, they have additional copies securely available in redundant locations. It is also easy to recover your data via a web interface over the internet, and they typically will mail you DVD's with your data on it for a fee.
- I've used a service called Mozy in the past and it performed pretty well. Currently I use Carbonite and have been very pleased. You can backup an unlimited amount of data from one computer for $54.95 a year. Multiple year plans are also available at a discounted rate. A small program runs on your computer, and every time you create a new file or modify an existing one, a secure, encypted copy is sent to one of their data centers. The is very effective and convenient.
I hope you have found this posting to be helpful and informative. Do you backup regularly, or are you admittedly not doing what you should to protect your data? Have you tried any of the online backup services and if so, what do you think of them? I'd love to hear from you below in the comments. Thanks for reading!
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