Happy World Backup Day! Ok, maybe it"s not exactly a holiday where we party all day long, but it"s a good reminder that in today"s day and age we have an ever increasing amount of digital content that"s important to us and that can be lost in the blink of an eye. Even if you have your data in a cloud based service like Dropbox or iCloud, are you protected if someone breaks into your account, like what happened to Mat Honan a few years ago?
The idea of backups is to always have at least two copies of your data in two different locations at any point in time so that if something happens to the original, the same issue will not negatively impact the second location. You can have onsite backups - which are in your home - or offsite backups - which are either stored in a cloud service, copied to a friend"s server, or even disks you bring to work.
It"s important that if your house burns down or your account is hacked, you"ll still have your data. For example, if you take pictures on your phone, think about also saving them to your local PC and to a cloud-based service like iCloud, Google+, or Amazon Cloud Drive. If you lose your mobile device, you can recover the photos from the cloud or your PC. If someone hacks your account, deletes the files from your cloud account, and remote wipes your mobile device, you still have the data on your PC.
The World Backup Day site has some interesting statistics about backups, such as the fact that 30% of people have never backed up any of their data and that 113 mobile phones are stolen every minute. They also include good instructions on how to backup your data to thumb drives, the cloud, and more, for those people who may not be quite as technical.
When it comes to backups, where do you rate? Are you backing up both onsite and offsite? Just one of the two? Or are you taking fate into your own hands and not backing up at all?