World Backup Day – March 31st
 

Remember to check your data backups today - March 31st. Backup your memories and financial information and check your old backup restores. The hard drive is the part of the computer where all your data is kept. The hard drive is the component that has the highest likelihood of breaking unexpectedly. If the hard drive breaks, the data will most likely be unrecoverable. Backup and make a backup habit, remember March 31st as World Backup Day.

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World Backup Day aims to remind users to perform backups of their important files. WBD is also a reminder to check the saved old backups – (1) to verify that the saved backups are readable and recoverable, and equally as important (2) to re-burn and re-make new backup media of old backup files. World Backup Day is a voluntary initiative made and popularized by users of the internet forums Reddit.com.

How to Backup?
CD’s / DVD’s / BluRay Discs
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Probably one of the cheapest media for backup purposes. Remember to keep discs safely stored at room temperature free of moisture and excess heat/cold. A single scratch on a disk may compromise the entire backup saved on it. Mold and dust can corrode optical discs.


USB flash drives / External Hard Drives
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They are larger, faster, just a bit more expensive the dvds, but their media life span is longer. Keep them safe from highly magnetic surfaces. As with optical discs, keep them away from moisture, dust, and mold.



Email as a backup
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Simply sending important id cards and scanned personal files to yourself via email can be considered as a backup. Free and paid email services like Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail are likely to be online for years and years to come. Remember though that these are free email services, and support is limited.


Dedicated Online Backup Services
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Backup your files to “cloud” – this is currently a popular theme when it comes to backup discussions. The term “cloud” essentially means to backup your files to the internet – where it can be accessible from almost anywhere – granted that you have the correct login and permissions. The hype of internet services being in the “cloud” has primarily launched the growth of numerous online backup services.

Choose an online backup service that suits your needs.
Primary considerations for an Online Backup Service

• Cost-vs-storage space (price per GB may be better than an expensive unlimited storage plan)
• Reputation and reliability, check customer feedback for uptime records, upload and download speeds.
• Restore and recovery options. In case you need to restore mass amounts of data, you will most likely not want to download hundreds of gigabytes. Check if they can provide burned dvd copies/ ship out physical hard drives that contain your data.
• Security and encryption. Your files should be encrypted and secured as they are sent out from your computer to the backup server. It would be reassuring to know that your files are kept secured and encrypted while they are stored and idle in the backup server.

Secondary consideration – all the extra bells and whistles to online backup services

• File backup synchronization across multiple computers
• The ability to share the backup files with other users
• File retention/versioning features, so you will have time to recover in case you have mistakenly deleted a backup file

Popular Online Backup Services
- Dropbox
- Mozy
- Carbonite
- ZumoDrive
- Microsoft’s SkyDrive
- Amazon Cloud Drive
- SugarSync