You've heard the story before. Someone stores all their pictures and their music on their phone; several months worth of memories and purchases are on the device. None of the data is backed up on another hard drive, yet the person is certain that it's all safe and sound. They won't lose any of it!
Then, the unthinkable happens: their phone is either damaged or stolen and all of that data is lost to them. They bemoan their loss...all those personal pictures and that bought music! Memories lost and money wasted! What on earth could they have done to have prevented this tragedy from occurring?
Well, they could have backed up their data. How? The simplest solution would have been for them to have kept a copy of their files on their computer. It's incredibly easy to transfer files from a phone to a computer: using a USB is the standard way while using a cloud storage app like Dropbox is another method. Given this simplicity, there is no excuse for not backing-up
This doesn't just apply to phones: It's also important to back up your computer. A computer less likely to get damaged or stolen as with a phone, but the hard drives can fail; if that data isn't backed up, you could lose it. Some people have lost years of work for not backing any of it up on another device.
Always back up your files; you won't regret it.
This happened to me a few time on computers. Now I save to either writing.com, e-mail or Google docs. I don't even trust flash drives because of viruses or user error!
ReplyDeleteAn external hard drive/storage device is the best way to go.
DeleteI'm good at backing up my phone, just because it's as easy as plugging it into my computer, but backing up my computer files, not so much. And I would be devastated if something happened to them. I should start being more proactive about that.
ReplyDeleteThe easiest thing to do is to buy an external storage drive and store your data on that. I'm not quite sure how expensive they are, although the benefits of having a backup for your data is worth more than its price; $50-$200 on a drive is a lesser cost compared to potentially losing years of data!
DeleteFlash discs come fairly cheap these days, I think, and can take quite an amount of data - it certainly works for storing school work and such like, though not too many photos or videos, I guess. Anyway, I use mine to transfer data between two computers, at school and at home, and usually leave the most important things on it as well (such as my current translating work).
ReplyDeleteI'm a bit bad about backing up my data myself, though, and at one point, I nearly lost quite a lot of something I had written, because I always backed it up during the weekend, and my old school computer crashed in the middle of the week! Fortunately, it came back on later... and I backed it up immediately. :D So there's also a lesson: do it as often as you can!
Ah yes, the feeling of "I hope I haven't lost all that data". :/ Don't worry, sometimes I forget to back up my data, too!
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