You've Heard It Before: Backup Your Stuff!
- Details
- Created on Wednesday, 18 April 2012 18:50
- Written by Geoff Myers
First off, this is not an advertisement. It's a genuine testimonial of a backup service that I use personally and recommend to clients because it works so well.
The piece of advice that I most commonly give to clients is that they need to backup. You know all those family photos & videos, important business documents, and that huge music collection that you've spent countless hours building and organizing? Everything could disappear tomorrow if your hard drive dies, your computer is stolen, or your house or place of business burns down. So many people know they're supposed to do it (I hear this from clients every day), but most people don't make it a high enough priority: you need to BACKUP now! Not tomorrow, not next week, not next year. You could lose everything at anytime.
But not only should you have an external hard drive connected to your computer that contains a backup, you really should also have an off-site (remote) backup! One way people used to do this was to save their important files onto a CD or DVD drive, or maybe a portable USB drive, then take it to the bank and store it in their safety deposit box. The huge problem with this is the backup becomes outdated very, very quickly and it's a huge pain to be constantly shuffling the backup disk(s) between the bank and your home or office. Luckily, there's a much better way to do this.
An off-site backup service that I discovered a year or two ago – and have fallen in love with since – is called Backblaze. It's a really slick service that works with Macs and Windows that backs up all your data to remote servers across the country so that if your house or office burns down tomorrow, or your computer and backup drive are stolen, you still have a full backup off-site that is safe and secure. I have personally highly recommended Backblaze to my clients because it works so seamlessly (it's very Apple-like), it costs only $4 per month, and you get unlimited backup storage (which is incredible for the price).
Please, do yourself a favor: if you don't already have an automated local backup and remote backup, make it a higher priority and get it done today because you never know what tomorrow holds...