March 31st is World Backup Day! As a result, we’re celebrating all month long with 10% off select Carbonite backup subscriptions.
Did you know that approximately 1:3 people do not back up any of their digital data? That’s a lot of photos, documents and other important stuff that isn’t being protected against a growing series of threats like drive failures, ransomware and even those little “oopsie!” moments where something is accidentally deleted.
What is backup?
At it’s most basic level, a backup is simply just a second copy of your files. The most simplistic way to perform the most basic of backups is to simply hold down [Ctrl] (or [Command] on a Mac) and click and drag a file to another spot on your screen. This makes a copy of the file that is completely separate from the original. You could change or even delete the original file and the copy will still remain. When it comes to backing up your data though, the “how” is is much more important than the “what”.
Okay so how do I backup my files?
This is actually the much larger question. There are many ways to back up data and the effectiveness of each depends on what you’re trying to protect your data from. Click-and-drag copies, like described above, are perfect if you want to make changes to a document or file but don’t want to risk harming the original. However, this really is all that this method is good for. If you want to protect against things like disk failure, you’ll need something a little different.
External hard drives, and their sibling flash memory devices, are another simple way to back up files. Instead of copying files from one place on your system to another, you copy the files to one of these external storage devices which you then unplug and securely store somewhere. This does an excellent job protecting against failure of your device. The downside here is that you need to remember to make copies of any new or changed files. Failure to do so means that those new or changed items will not be protected in the event that your device crashes.
Cloud backup is an even better way to back up. Unlike the previous two methods there’s no manual labor involved. No needing to remember to back up new files or files that have changed. In addition to that, cloud backup is off site. Off site means that the backed up copies don’t reside with you in your house or workplace but in multiple other locations. This means that, in the event of a total disaster (fire, flood, etc) your backup is still safe because it’s residing in a place where the disaster isn’t.
So then what’s this deal about Carbonite?
Carbonite is a cloud backup service for home users as well as businesses. They offer an extremely simple backup solution that not only backs up your data to the cloud automatically, but it even automatically chooses new files and folders to back up. It’s complete peace of mind without the work.
And, to help bring attention to world backup day, we’re offering 10% off the first year of the following Carbonite subscription levels:
Personal Subscriptions
- Personal Plus
- Personal Prime
Office Subscriptions
- Office Power
- Office Ultimate
And if you run a really big business and would like a more hybrid style backup, let us know and we can work with you on a new Carbonite E2 Hybrid cloud system.
Have any more questions? Use the form below to get in touch and we’ll do our best to answer them!
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