Here are ten common mistakes you want to avoid.
We’re not going to judge you.
Not Having a Backup Plan: Why Are You Doing It?
Do you only care about backing up family photos and documents?
Cheaping Out: Good Backup Systems Cost Money
Storage media costs money.
Maintaining cloud infrastructure costs money.
Not Automating Your Backups: Skip Habits, Use Systems
Habits are hard to create and maintain.
Use the apps and tools provided by youronline backup provideron your setup, phone, and other devices.
If you change the files, the changes are synced to the remote location.
You’ve even routinely backup that data to external drives and popped them in a small fire safe.
Compared to most people, that’s a pretty serious and effective backup system.
Diversifying your backups is important to survive a catastrophe.
Online backups do have one big downside, however.
It’s slow going to upload large amounts of data, and it’s slow going to download it.
We, without question, recommend including online backups as part of your backup strategy.
But you shouldn’t rely completely on them.
The same goes for restoring large data pools.
It might not take long to download 20GB of personal documents from a cloud provider.
A hot or online backup is a file backup that is powered up and available.
If a power surge takes out the PC, it will likely take out the backup drive too.
If the data is immediately accessible and you might alter it, it’s a hot backup.
Nothing that happens to the PC it was connected to matters.
The cold storage files will just hang out where you left them, waiting to be restored.
As you could imagine, cold storage is crucial forlong-term data storage.
And just because you use a cloud-based backup service doesn’t mean you should ignore this advice.
What kind of encryption does your backup provider use?
Can they decrypt your files?
What good is a backup if you might’t recover the data?
And don’t limit yourself to just considering whether or not you could retrieve the backup.
Consider how long it will take, too.
to download everything will be unbearably frustrating when the time comes to restore.
