We have all heard cautionary tales about data loss and failure to safely back up our data. Computers fail and 1000s of photos, music, and important files are lost. You may have an external hard drive and back up occasionally, but you may not know that external hard drives are not the most secure or reliable option.
One of the quickest ways to ensure your personal or business backups are done on time, and at the right frequency, is to automate them. Backing up manually places the onus on the user or employee to complete the backups themselves. Busy schedules often put doing our backup at the bottom of the to-do list. By automating this process, you ensure that your data is safe and secure.
While automating backups to a physical hard drive in your home or office is a good start, external hard drives themselves are not necessarily the most reliable choice. External hard drives have a life expectancy and can fail at any time. Relying solely on an external hard drive for your data storage could leave you vulnerable to mass data loss. In addition, ransomware attacks are now targeting local backups and are specifically looking for those to encrypt. By backing up to the cloud, rather than locally, your data is not accessible to ransomware attacks.
While you should maintain a local, hard drive backup, you should also have a cloud based backup of your data. In the event you need to restore your data, it is much quicker to do so from a hard drive, as opposed to the cloud. Cloud based backups and storage are the most secure, reliable, and effortless way to backup our data. Cloud based storage means you do not have to worry about hard drive failure, damage, or computer loss or theft, you can rest easy knowing your files are secure in the cloud.
Max Sadlowski of Sadlowski Consulting knows the importance of cloud backups from personal experience, “A client of mine once left their work laptop on an airplane in the seat pocket, upon realizing that the laptop was gone about 3 hours later, the laptop was nowhere to be found. The next steps for the client were to buy a new computer, download a single application, and within 2 hours, had her complete computer restored as if it had never been lost. If she had not had an up to date, cloud backup, the client would have been severely impacted”. Let me know if you like this anecdotal bit here from Max. We were chatting and he reminded me of this incident with a former client.
Frequent, automated, and monitored backups is your best defence. If you are backing up regularly, even if your computer is lost or stolen, you can get up and running again on new hardware with little stress or interruption to your business.
