The Importance of Data Backups: Are You Backing Up Your Data?

Are you backed up? I had a scare recently that I had lost all of my pictures on my computer when none of my photos would open up. It turns out that everything was fine after a reboot, but for a minute I felt the pain of what it would feel like to loose everything. It made me question how I am backing up my data. Today, everyone is storing something important and of value on their computer; whether it is a mid-term paper, family photos/movies, music, emails, or business documents. This makes it that much more important to backup data on a regular basis. Some of you may be backed up already but are you backed up enough? This blog post will explore the options of backing up data for everyone.

First off, are you really backing up? Simply storing data on an external drive is not necessarily backing up. Because if that external drive croaks (which eventually will) you are SOL. It is only backed up when the data is stored on at least 2 separate drives. So if you have the data on your computer and the external that would suffice as a backup.

In determining your backup method, you have to ask yourself: How important is my data and what would be the impact if I lost everything? For some, it may not cause any sort of financial impact but it may cause heartache when you loose the video of your baby’s first steps, your wedding photos or your massive music collection. For others, such as a photographer, author or a small business owner, it may cause a financial loss (along with the heartache). Below are some ways to backup data for pretty much anyone’s needs. The 4 backup measures below are the most common and go from weaker (data is less important) to stronger (data is more important).

External Hard Drive (One Drive) and Computer Hard Drive

This is the most common and cheapest method of backups. The user simply copies (either manually or automatically using backup software) data from their computer to the drive. Notice it is a “copy” from the computer to the drive, not a “cut”. In this situation the data is stored on your computer and on the external drive so if one fails you will be able to restore with the other, assuming they both don’t die at the exact same time.

Pros: Inexpensive and easy to setup.
Cons: Eventually your computer will run out of space; so you can only use your computers hard drive for so long if it is part of your backup.

Raid 1 (Disk Mirroring)
Raid 1 is a type of drive that has 2 separate disks. The best way to describe Raid 1 is both disks mirror each other. So if one fails, the other still holds the same exact data. Once the failed disc is replaced the new drive will automatically start mirroring the functioning drive. In this scenario you always have at least 2 copies of your data and sometimes 3 if the data is also stored on your computer. This allows you to offload data from your computer and store backups strictly on the Raid 1 device.

Pros: Relatively Inexpensive, Automatic disk mirroring, Ability to offload data from computer.
Cons: Cuts usable storage space in half. If it’s a 4 TB Raid 1 drive it really only has 2 TB of usable storage because the data is redundant.

Raid 5
Raid 5 is similar to Raid 1 in the fact that the data is mirrored, however, in Raid 5 there are 4 drives (apposed to 2 in Raid 1). However, with Raid 5 the usable storage goes up. For example, if you had four 1 TB drives you would have 2 TB of usable storage in Raid 1 but with Raid 5 you would have 3 TB of usable storage.

Pros: More usable storage, Automatic disk mirroring
Cons: Expensive

Online Storage
There are multiple services that allow you to automatically backup data to their servers for a monthly/yearly fee. Typically a piece of software runs in the background and constantly backs your data up to their servers. This is a great choice because if a disaster happened to your home (fire, tornado, etc) your data will be safe. If you are dealing with larger files such as pictures and videos this probably isn’t ideal since the upload/download times are much slower than that of a local drive.

Pros: Relatively easy to use, no need for a physical device, remote access to storage.
Cons: Much slower than having a local drive, monthly and yearly fees could end up costing more than a good drive.