5 Advantages To Backing Up Your Computers

In all businesses data and information is core and without it operations and management would be complex, imagine losing all files for your next big meeting or your client or partner list with their details and contact information. Data or access to data stored on a personal computer, phone or tablet can be lost, often without any warning. Hardware failure, theft, or malware infection (such as the cryptolocker ransomware attack) can make recovering your data expensive or impossible. You need to back-up your data.

There are two main options for backing-up your data:

• Performing your own back-ups to a storage device (USB or external hard drive)
• Backing up to an online (cloud) service

Consider Multiple Back-Ups
While maintaining one back-up provides protection against sudden incidents, such as the theft or failure of a computer, greater protection can be gained by having multiple back-ups.

The limitation of only having one back-up is that sometimes data loss can happen slowly in the background and may not be noticed until too late. Some types of ransomware and hardware faults can cause this, and sometimes users inadvertently delete important files without realising it. The loss of an important file may not be noticed for a while, by which time the most recently backed-up copy will have been overwritten and lost.

While keeping multiple back-ups can require more management, time and capacity, they allow you to ‘go back in time’ much further to retrieve important files.

The following table shows each back-up type and the advantages and disadvantages with it: