Keeping your data away from hackers is something that all people and businesses want, however, sometimes hackers can get into systems and can cause damage and do all sorts of stuff which can inconvenience us and even cost us a lot of money.
A ransomware attack for example can lock you out of your data and charge you to get it back without any guarantees. Therefore it’s always important to keep your data safe and backed up.
Today we will look at the best ways of backing up your data in terms of ease of doing so, affordability and effectiveness. So without further delay let’s jump straight into it.
Why backup your data?
According to Hosting Tribunal, “40-60% of small businesses won’t reopen after data loss.” Those businesses that do open could lose anywhere upwards of $8000 per hour due to the loss too.
As you can see losing data can have a huge effect on a small business so doing everything possible to avoid this circumstance is important. Especially as backing up your data doesn’t cost much either. Here are some of the best ways to do so.
1) Hiring an external IT Support team
If you are a business and you are concerned with data loss then you can hire an IT support team to manage data backups and recovery for your business. The size of your business and the devices that you want to cover will affect the cost of your business so keep that in mind.
If you are a smaller business and maybe only use 1 or 2 computers then this option may not be as cost-effective as some of the other methods below so if this sounds like you keep on reading.
2) Using an external hard drive to backup your data
If you are a small business and don’t require huge amounts of data backup services then doing it yourself and keeping a copy of your data on an external drive will do the job.
When looking for an external drive look for a company that has a good reputation so you know the drive you purchase will be reliable. Drives can still break and data can go missing so if you can afford it get more than one drive. This way you can have a backup of a backup.
Companies such as Seagate and Western Digital have been creating external hard drives for years so you may want to start with a company like those.
External hard drives come in a range of sizes and speeds so do some research to see which ones would suit your needs best. You can get a hard drive with a few terabytes of data and a USB 3.0 connection for less than $100.
3) Backing up onto old media
This may sound a little different but CD’s and DVD’s are still a great way of backing up your data for cheap and you are less likely to overite the data as people often don’t use DVDs or CDs anymore.
Most computers used to come with CD burners but as technology, as moved on they aren’t as common anymore so if you do want to use old media you could outsource this to a company such as Digital Converters for a small fee.
But if your computer does have a burner the process is very easy to do, drop your files you want to copy onto this burner drive and use burning software which you can find online to transfer your data to a CD or DVD.
4) Using cloud computing to backup your data
One of the cheapest, quickest and most reliable ways of backing up your data is through cloud storage. For those of you who don’t know what cloud storage is then it’s a network of computers or servers where your data can be stored upon.
Cloud computing used to be very expensive but as technology has improved the price of storage has come down and now you can get terabytes of storage for less than $100 a year.
Companies that offer cloud storage that can be relied upon include:
- IDrive
- Google Drive
- Dropbox
All of the above are good choices for cloud storage, my personal favourite is Dropbox because there is an app you can install where it syncs your computer and your storage account and therefore takes all of the hassle out of backing up your data.
Backing up your data is time-consuming and can become a chore especially if you are using multiple devices to keep your data safe. With cloud computing, this is taken care of programmatically for you so you have one less thing to worry about.
Backing up your data best practices
Keeping your data safe is important as a business but purchasing devices or storage and not using it isn’t going to keep your data safe. When it comes to backing up your data you will not only need a device for storage but you will also need a backup process which you can do regularly.
It’s recommended that you should back up your data onto multiple devices so you have a few copies if anything were to go wrong. What we would recommend is to have a physical copy of your data and a digital copy of your data.
Having multiple copies of your data is the best way to secure it against any cybercriminals.
