Did You Back Up Your Data On World Backup Day? ‘Book Mystique Extra
March 31 was World Backup Day, but if losing your electronically archived data would cause you major difficulty or inconvenience, every day should be World Backup Day, so it’s never too late to do a backup, or preferably redundant backups stored in different media.
Banefully, according to a NationalToday.com World Backup Day survey of 1,000 Americans, conducted on March 12, 2017, researchers found that one in five never back up their devices; more than one half of Americans (53%) back up their devices only once a month or less frequently; 12 percent report backing up about once every six months, about half that percentage do a backup roughly once a year, and one in five (20%) electronic device users live dangerously and never back up any of their devices at all. Only one in 10 survey respondents said say they back up every day — the recommended interval.
Some 15 in 100 Americans surveyed said losing their data is one of their biggest fears with four percent allowing they’d rather lose a credit card. These are not idle apprehensions, with 16 percent of Americans reporting they’ve lost data due to not backing up their devices. You read of or hear stories about people who work for months or years on a book manuscript or other major project with no backups, then lose it all in a disk drive crash or their device gets stolen. Just gotta’ shake your head. Backing up isn’t that difficult or time-consuming, folks.
The NationalToday.com World Backup Day survey analysts note that a majority of Americans use their electronic devices to store fond memories, with 67 percent saying they’d be most upset by losing picture records of family and friends if their data were compromised, although only three percent of respondents would be most upset by the loss of their selfies — proving Americans commendably love their friends more than themselves.
Overall ranking of data Americans are most afraid to lose:
#1: Pictures of family and friends (67%)
#2: Passwords (9%)
#3: Music (7%)
#4: Text message history (5%)
#5: Videos (4%)
I have to confess that I don’t do formal backups daily, although most of my added data related to works in progress gets uploaded to Dropbox and Mega automatically.
My favorite global backup medium is an external hard drive, or more accurately hard drives. I have four on the go — two with 500 GB capacity plus one and two terabyte units — including one dedicated to Mac Time Machine backups of my anchor MacBook Air’s SSD and three with bootable clones of hard drive contents done at successive dates. I also back up my iPad to my Mac, so the latest backup gets copied to the external hard drive backups as well. If you have a Mac, using macOS Time Machine is the easiest automated backup software solution, but there are others including Carbon Copy Cloner and SuperDuper that can create bootable clones on external drives.
Another option is to store your data online using one of the many services available — some of them free. I use Dropbox and Mega mainly, but there are plenty others including Apple’s iCloud, Google Cloud, WMware Storage, Barracuda Cloud Storage, and Microsoft OneDrive.
For more information on World Backup Day, visit:
http://nationaltoday.com/us/world-backup-day/
Source: NationalToday.com