Back-up Back-up, Back-up! – Best ways to Back-up your Data

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]I’ve learned many a lesson though my university years about backing up my data. We rely so much on our computers for a range of activities, and they sadly are not built to last for ever. Through university I had 2 laptop fail on me, the first time I lost a lot of my work, but thankfully it was only a written assignments. The second time my motherboard broke and corrupted all of my files and my back-ups. If I had a proper back up plan in place then my loss of work would have been minimal, but you definitely live and learn.

Now that we are trusted with the precious moments of clients weddings, newborn, family portraits and unforgettable parties, having a back-up system in place is more important than ever, and heres a few options that you can choose from:

• Write to DVD – An oldie but a goodie. DVD’s are fairly durable in terms of you can drop them and shake them. No moving parts means they can literally be thrown around. The downside however is they can be scratched easily and “only” hold 4.7GB which in todays data terms isn’t a lot.
• Write to Blu-ray – Similar to DVD but you need a special Blu-Ray writer and the discs are fairly expensive to buy still but they hold a whopping 25GB so the price per GB is still affordable.
• Copy to external hard drive – External hard drives are becoming more and more affordable and are perfect for backing up large quantities of data. You can get them as desktop drives or portable so you can back up on the go. Some hard drives even connect to your home network so you can access your data away from home by logging into the hard drive with an internet connection. Our personal choice for constant running hard drives is the G-Technology 2TB external hard drive using Firewire (also has USB3) and they can be daisy chained, linking to each other so you only require one connection for up to 8 hard drives.
• Cloud storage – This is an option which we have only just started using ourselves. The two big cloud storage giants that spring to mind are Dropbox and Google. They are super easy to use, you can access your data across a range of device platforms and basic accounts are free to use.

Which ever back up plan you decide to implement, it may also be important to make sure that you have an off site back up in place, and paramount if you are running a business from home or an office space. You can have multiple back-ups in place at home or at the office but should a theft occur or a fire destroy your equipment you will be left with nothing.

Currently, we use one hard drive to automatically back up our MacBooks and IMac, one to back up our photography and personal files, and another drive to back up them all (this one is kept off site). For convenience of access we also upload JPEG files to google drive. This may all sound a lot, but should any of our machines die, hard drives fail or everything gets stolen from home, we have our data backed up and data loss is kept to a minimum.

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