World Backup Day, Toshiba stresses the importance of having a solid and well-defined backup strategy to ensure data integrity in any situation.
The amount of data that each of us accumulates nowadays is enormous: photos, video content, music and games that must be easily accessible and properly stored. On World Backup Day, the company emphasizes the importance of having a well-defined backup strategy to ensure the long-term integrity of archived data.
Irina Chan, Specialist Product Marketing Management at Toshiba Electronics Europe GmbH
Research has shown that a minority of people back up their data on a regular basis, and most worryingly, most never do, exposing their data to significant risk. Getting users used to periodically backing up helps mitigate the prospect of irrecoverable data loss.
The reasons for backing up are many and varied, the most important being:
- Computer devices, such as smartphones and tablets, can be stolen or lost, along with all the data they contain.
- Serious malfunctions can occur, especially towards the end of the device’s life cycle.
- Cyber threats are now present on a large percentage of computers: data from Statista indicates that the number of malware attacks detected on an annual basis is close to reaching 6 billion.
- Saved files can easily be deleted by mistake.
Irina Chan
There is no single solution for dealing with backup. There are many factors to consider before determining the frequency, methods, and placement of storage resources. You need to decide which media to use. External hard drives are a more reliable, capacious and faster alternative to USB sticks. Budget, performance, capacity, interoperability, and security impact HDD choice, as do design and size. Furthermore, by choosing a model that supports automatic backup, the user, once the archiving frequency is configured, will no longer have to worry about it.
Toshiba provides some useful tips to maximize backup effectiveness:
- Determine the frequency of backups: For creative professionals who continuously update their archive or for consultants who manage critical information, frequent backups (every few days or weekly) will need to be performed. Even for students who have large projects to complete, it will be important to back up periodically so that many hours of hard work are not wasted.
- Stick to a schedule: Despite good intentions, people often fail to stick to scheduled backup tasks. It is recommended to perform small incremental backups between the main backups, so that only the changes made to users’ data since the last backup are saved (making the whole process quick and easy).
- Recover data: Knowing how to recover data is essential and it is ideal to consider this aspect in advance, rather than after the data loss has actually occurred.
- Don’t store all your data in one place: In the event of a fire, flood or theft, even if your data has been duplicated and placed on two different devices, both could be lost at the same time, so it is essential to back up to another position. It is often necessary for the data to be stored locally, for example using a Canvio HDD, but also in the cloud. Toshiba advocates the 3-2-1 approach, whereby for maximum effectiveness, data should be stored in three separate locations, on two different types of storage medium, and with one copy stored off-site (usually in the clouds).
- Clean up stored data: documents and applications that are no longer relevant should be removed, as well as temporary files and cookies that take up space unnecessarily. This will speed up the backup procedures, as well as having more storage space available for future needs.