There are many threats to your computing data including; computer malfunctions, accidental destruction , and ransomeware. That being the case there are three primary rules for protecting your data, they are; backup, backup backup. Backup being the most important thing you can do, how should you go about it?

First of all you should have a good local backup of just your data. There is no need to backup your operating system or your programs. Only businesses do a full disk image back because they need to get up-and-running fast. They spend more time and effort on the backup to save time on the restore. This makes since for business. All we need to do is backup our data.

Local backups are great for all three of the major issues, computer malfunctions, accidental destruction , and ransomeware but what if you get hit by a hurricane or a fire and everything is gone.

There is a story out there that I could not find about a famous film writer (maybe Scorsese) whose home was broken into. They stole his computer and his backups, get all of the new script he was working on. Probably costing a bundle.

The writer should have had an offsite back up. This can come in many forms. What the security guru Steve Gibson use to do is, every week he took a DVD (now days a portable hard-drive) to his mom’s house. This is a great offsite backup.

Online Back

One very popular form of offsite back these days is to backup to the cloud. This can be a very convenient. There are many product to choose from. Checkout the online backup post for more info.