Brad W. Allen

In a statistic I’m making up, millions of people lose their most valuable data every day due to a hard drive failure! Oh no! Don’t be a made up statistic!

For most people that valuable data is pictures and videos. The interesting thing is that a lot of people actually think they’re backing up their data by moving it to an external hard drive but the truth is that they’re really not. Having your data in 2 places is a backup but notice I said move not copy.

What happens when that external hard drive fails? Trust me, it will.

What happens when your house burns down? Less likely sure, but likely enough that you keep insurance on your home just in case right? Insurance will probably replace the damaged external drive but will it replace the pictures and videos? Not possible.

What if a water pipe breaks and damages the external drive? What if you accidentally spill your coffee on it?

Maybe you do make a copy of your pictures and have two copies, one on your laptop and one on the external drive. How many of the above scenarios would still cause you to lose everything?

I’m rambling a bit but surely you get the point: “backing up” to the external drive sitting right next to your computer is a fragile backup solution at best.

Yeah, yeah, so now what? Well, the best solution is to continue what you’re doing but add in an automated off-site backup as well. “Automated” and “off-site” are the key words here. Automated ensures that it happens without you forgetting (which you will) and off-site ensures that none of the scenarios above cause you to lose your data forever.

Most off-site solutions work basically the same way. You install a small piece of backup software on your computer, tell the software what folders or drives you want backed up and what time of day you want the backup to happen and boom, sleep better.

There are several good off-site backup solutions out there and all of them have a fairly menial monthly fee (relative to the value of your data). I don’t want this to sound like an ad but the service I trust with my data is called Backblaze.

Backblaze is $5 a month for unlimited data which is pretty damn reasonable if you ask me.

Your initial backup will take a while because you’re likely backing up gigabytes worth of birthday parties and Christmas get-togethers but after that it’ll only backup the differences.

Do yourself a favor and think about your backup solution and how valuable your data is to you. You’re likely not doing enough as you should.