Dave’s
Computers in New Jersey works a lot with our local community performing data
recovery and general computer and network services. One thing we like to tell
everyone is the importance of backups. We all know we need them but few
actually get around to doing them. One thing we suggest a lot is an offsite
backup.
An offsite
backup is a backup of your critical data stored elsewhere. For businesses, this
could be your disaster recovery location, data storage facility or in the
cloud. For home users, this is usually the cloud. With many cloud providers
offering gigabytes of storage for free, it makes sense to use some of that
storage for backups.
An
effective backup solution is a copy stored locally and at least one copy
offsite. That way, if something happens to your home, like fire or burglary,
you have another copy of all your data safe in the cloud. You may never need it
and you may never use it but it will be there if you do.
Our data
recovery services are very good but they take time and are not guaranteed to
recover everything. Our success rate is very high but data recovery is an
inexact science and computers just love to overwrite data to save space. Once
overwritten, that data is extremely difficult to salvage. Nothing is impossible
though!
Data
backups are essential for preserving personal data, family pictures and
anything you don’t want to or cannot afford to lose. With most of us putting
more of our documents and data on the computer, the requirement to keep it safe
becomes more important.
With
malware, ransomware and viruses on the increase, it isn’t just hardware failure
or accident that causes data loss. Attacks are becoming more sophisticated all
the time and while new viruses are decreasing, attempted attacks by existing
ones are not. New malware and ransomware is being developed constantly and
malware scanners struggle to keep up.
An offsite
data backup protects your from all these threats, accidents, hardware failures
and attack.
Setting up offsite
backups is very straightforward. If you use Windows, OneDrive is built in and
can be configured to backup your files. If you use Mac, TimeMachine does the
same thing. There are also lots of third party programs for both systems that
can copy and back up entire drives or folders as needed.
It takes
less than 15 minutes to set up an offsite backup. Considering the potential of
data loss, it makes perfect sense to do it. If you need help setting it up,
Dave’s Computers will help.