World Backup Day – Make a Plan

Today is World Backup Day if you have not noticed I have been writing about it most of the week. Of course here at OnlineBackupDeals.com every day is World Backup Day and really you do need to backup and check your backups more than once a year. Since today is World Backup Day here are some thoughts on keeping your data safe and sound.

Make a Backup Plan
To quote John “Hannibal” Smith from the A-Team favourite tag line “I love it when a plan comes together.” The first step in making sure your data is safe is to have a plan. Make sure you take a look at all the places you create data and that you have a plan to backup each area. This can include your home computer/laptop, cloud services like Google Docs and Facebook, your tablet and smartphones and your website. Once you make a list of all the places you have data that need backing up you can find a way how to back them all up.

 

Computer Backup
If you just have data stored on one or two computers at your house your backup plan is pretty simple really. At minimum this is what I suggest you do to keep that data safe.

Have a local backup of your data – Use an external hard drive, a spare internal hard drive, a network attached storage or even an old computer that can act as a backup server. Just make sure you have a local backup. As much as I talk about and suggest you use online backup, local backup is still faster to restore from.

Have a backup copy offsite – Get an extra external hard drive and take it to work with you to store. Keep it at a friends house, your parents, somewhere other than at your house. Of course dragging an external hard drive back and forth can get tiring, so this is where online backup comes in. It can help you maintain and keep that offsite backup copy and save you tons of time. If you don’t want to drag a hard drive around from place to place pick an online backup service and start using it.

That is the simple version, it starts to get more complicated if you have tablets, smartphones, and have started using various cloud services to keep you data in but it can all get backed up.

Cloud Services Backup
For cloud service backup take a look at Backupify to backup your cloud services like Google Docs, Twitter and Facebook. If you only use Google Docs you could look at something like InSync. If you just use Facebook SOS Online Backup does offer a Facebook backup as well so you might be covered already if you have an account with them. If you do copy the data to your computer make sure it gets included in the computer backup.

Tablets and Smartphones
The information we create with our smartphones and tablets continues to grew each day. The majority of that information is probably photos and videos. If you don’t want to root your device you have a few free options. Google+ will automatically copy photos and videos up to Google. Dropbox now has an automatic photo and video upload feature. If you already subscribe to SugarSync or Mozy their apps feature photo and video upload as well. IDrive also has an app that can backup your contacts. SOS Online Backup can also help protect your information from your tablet and smartphone.

Website Backup
If you run a website don’t forget to backup it as well. Depending on the type of server it is on you can use the control panel to create a full backup and download it to your computer. If you use WordPress to power your website you should check out our post on backing up your WordPress site to Dropbox to get some ideas on how to back it up.

Save Money Today
If you need to work on your backup plan today is a great chance to save some money on a backup service. There are several discounts listed in our World Backup Day archive as well we have discounts listed on many of the services review pages and on our latest deals page. Some of the deals we do currently have are:

  • Try Backblaze and Enter to Win an iPad
  • 25% off Mozy March 31st Only using promo code WORLDBACKUP
  • 25% off SOS Online Backup
  • 10% off Carbonite
  • 10% off CrashPlan

There is also still time to get in on our World Backup Day contest.

Happy World Backup Day!


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