How Often Do You Back Up Your Data? Try This If You Don’t

hammering a harddrive

How often do you back up your data from your PC or laptop? If you’re like most people, probably hardly ever. You probably mean to do it, but every day, something else comes up and that full backup just does not happen.

Hey – it’s happened long ago, to us as well. Long hours working on a project every day and the last thing you want to do is figure out how or to where you are going to back up. “Besides,” you think to yourself, “everything is working fine. What are the chances the hard drive will die today?”

This is one of the reasons people don’t backup regularly. Hard drives are actually pretty dependable over the course of two to three years so it’s one of those things that, while should be a high priority, gets put on the backburner. However, hard drives are definitely not perfect. I can recall a time when we purchased six hard drives all at once. After about a month, four of them crashed within a 24 hour period. It appeared all the drives were likely from the same production run which possibly introduced unintended defects.

We end up depending on the reliability of hard drives – but then, like many other things in life, the worse case happens at the worse possible moment. You forgot to backup, and you hear the horrible crunching noises coming from your drive. Then your computer won’t boot. If you’re lucky, you might be able to recover some of the data using some drive utilities, but that’s time-consuming, nerve-wracking, and never guaranteed. So, with our propensity to put off things, is there a better way?

Backing Up To The Cloud

Today, it is possible to back up your important data to the cloud and there are a number of different ways to do this. You can “roll your own” backup solutions or use something that already exists as a service for the purpose.

Here, we’ve been using the services of SpiderOak and think it’s pretty awesome. They have several different offerings, but specifically, their “One Backup” is what we use. It’s available for Windows, Macs, and yes – Linux (our preferred operating system).

One of the great features of SpiderOak is that you can access your backed up files from other devices. This means that when I head off to Greece with my laptop, I don’t really need to worry that I have the files and data that I will need access to when there. I do not need to worry about copying files to portable drives. With the SpiderOak One application running on my PC and laptop devices, I always have access to files I might need no matter which device I have with me.

If you worry about the fact you have been negligent with your backups, you should consider SpiderOak.

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