Has it ever happened that you had to write some documents or create spreadsheets, but because of a random accident, for example, power outage or your computer crash, you lost the data during the process of creating it? If the answer is yes, you clearly know how irritating and depressing at the same time it can be.
In this example, it was only one document that you lost, but things can get much worse. What if something happens to your computer, and you lose every data that you have in there? We store so many critical files – important photos and videos, documents essential for work, and various confidential information. They can all be lost, causing you a lot of trouble and sorrow. Unfortunately, the majority of people don’t even have the idea that it’s possible to backup data. The easiest way to ensure that critical files are safe is to use backup software. In this article, you can learn why you should do this.
Backup – what is it?
A backup is a copy of one computer data, which is stored on another system. It allows you to recover the files that you lost in case of any emergency to a specific date when backup took place. If you do it often enough, there’s a chance that you will lose the absolute minimum amount of progress.
Why is it important?
Creating backup copies gives you extra protection so that you can be sure that you won’t lose anything that you worked on. It’s never a good idea to store essential information in one place only. You should always make sure that except on your computer, data is also stored on other servers and databases. It doesn’t matter whether you lose a file because of your mistake, files corruption, or some physical failure – there are ten types of backups, so it’s possible to recover any information.
Keep in mind that there’s plenty of malware software, hackers, and other types of threats on the Internet. They all are looking to steal your data and harm you as much as possible. It’s good to use external hard drives, although their biggest flaw is the available space. The price of the highest capacity hard drives is not affordable for everyone – that’s why purchasing a backup software is a much better idea from the economic point of view.
How much is it going to cost you?
There’s plenty of backup software available for you, and before you purchase one, you have to take into consideration what features the software offers. In general, the price of the best backup software is a cost in the range between $25 to $100 per year. You can also use free backup software before you decide to buy a subscription.
Before you choose a product, make sure to carefully read what is included in the offer. Try to find software that gives you the possibility to back up locally, but also to the cloud. Oftentimes, backup programs come with useful anti-ransomware protection, which guarantees you an even higher level of security. Compare different offers and look for features that you find the most useful. Products that perfectly suit your needs might be slightly more expensive, but it often happens that quality comes with a price, and this field is not an exception.
Why should you use it when there are other possibilities?
Data loss prevention is critical, and it’s best if you take care of it on several levels. It doesn’t matter if your data is business-related or if it’s just personal files. Always make sure to store essential information in more than one database. A lot of people back up information to cloud storage. It’s good to do it; however, backup software allows you to create multiple backup copies. Because of that, you can choose to back up to the version that you need the most.
How often should you back up your files?
It only depends on you and your needs. If you’re going to only backup your private files, you don’t have to do that very often. Once per week or even a month should be more than enough. When it comes to business files backup, it’s worth doing them much more often. It also depends on the frequency of information change. If the data is changing daily, it might be worth to do daily if not hourly backups. Because of that, you can make sure that you won’t lose any progress at all. However, if data isn’t changing too fast, you don’t have to worry that much – weekly or monthly backups will prevent you from losing important files, and you won’t have to be bothered with creating tens of backups that often.
Data loss can hurt you badly. This is why you need to make sure that all the essential files which you store on a computer are safe. Using backup software gives you the best protection, and prevents you from losing things that you surely want to keep.