How to Backup Your Data Safely and Securely

There’s a computer maintenance mantra that’s often ignored, and any techie you talk to can tell you what it is; backup, backup, backup.

In an increasingly tech-reliant age, it’s becoming more and more common for people to put their entire lives on their hard drives, from pictures of family vacations to mission-critical business documents.  However, there’s a big problem with this type of practice: hard drives fail.

And, before you ask, yes thumb drives, floppy disks, Zip disks, and pretty much anything else you can think of will also eventually fail.  One of the worst assumptions you can make is that your data is safe when it’s only contained on one medium.

So, you backup, backup, backup.  But here’s the sad truth: for every person who backs their data up correctly, there are a hundred who are making a big error that’s going to cost them eventually. 

What exactly is backup?  Believe it or not, this term is misinterpreted by quite a lot of people.  “Backing up” a file is creating a copy of said file on another medium.  It is not simply moving that file around; many of my friends claim to “back up” regularly, when actually they’re just moving files from their computer to their external hard drives.  This is a great way to free up space, but an external drive is as likely to fail as an internal drive.

The best forms of backup are automatic, because people make errors, and contrary to popular belief, computers do not.  Programs like Dantz Retrospect create periodic copies of files onto external drives and other medium—you can set them up so that when you’re sleeping, your computer is copying your important pictures, documents, and whatever else you need onto your external drive.  If your internal hard disk fails, you’re golden; simply install a new hard drive, and your files are waiting for you on your external.