Scanning your analog photos is the first step to keeping your memories safe from floods, earthquakes, fires, and any other disaster. The next step is to make sure those digital files are safe and sound.
Things like the blue screen of death, a corrupted hard drive or a broken DVD could strike at any time—and when they do, you need to turn to your backup plan for help.
There are a ton of backup options out there—hard drives, cloud services, DVDs, flash drives, etc. But after we read The Best Way to Back Up Your Computer, written by Geoffrey Fowler (@GeoffreyFowler) at The Wall Street Journal, the idea of automatic cloud storage had us totally intrigued.
Essentially, these services automatically back up the documents, files, and photos on your computer, so you don’t have to do it manually.
In his article, Fowler explores some of the most popular automatic backup storage options, thoroughly testing each service and offering his guidance and advice on which to consider for your needs. The main services he reviews are CrashPlan (@crashplan), BackBlaze (@backblaze), Carbonite (@Carbonite), and SOS (@SOSOnlineBackup).
While Fowler makes excellent points as to why investing in these services is a great idea, we do want to encourage everyone to have more than a Plan B—a Plan C, and possibly even a Plan D, can’t hurt.
With the automatic backup options there is a chance these sites could lose customer data—and some may automatically delete older files over time. To avoid this, we encourage everyone to also perform a manual backup of your data at least once a month. This way, if your cloud service fails, you have the hard drive versions—and vice versus.
You can never be too safe—make sure to back those files up today!
Update (3/29/2017): If you’re looking for a fair comparison of online backups, check out this CompariTech breakdown.
