Do you have a backup strategy for your computer?

Christopher from Create IT

This week, two jobs for clients reminded me how important it is to have a reliable backup system for your computer, yet many people don't think about it till it's too late.
Computers have electrical and mechanical parts that eventually fail, so just like you should have an insurance policy for you home and vehicle, you should have some sort of backup strategy to protect business and personal data such as photos and emails.
Lots of people think they have some form of backup, but a lot of the time they don't actually know if it's working properly, or whether it is backing up everything it should.
In my clients' case there were a happy endings, but it was good luck rather than good management, and there was more disruption and expense than there needed to be.
I've now set them up with a more reliable system that is regularly scheduled, and will advise if it is unsuccessful.
What backup strategy works best depends what you have to back up. If you've got a lot of photos and personal video files, the cloud might be expensive and slow, but for small files like most spreadsheets and Word documents, the cloud might be ideal.
Apart from your personal files, you should also consider a complete backup of your whole computer. If a hard drive fails, and you've only backed up your personal files, all your programs will need to be reinstalled and configured. If you have a complete, system backup, it's simply a case of popping in a new hard drive, restoring everything from backup, and restarting the computer.
Phones and tablets need backing up too, but they'll often synchronise a lot of data to the cloud automatically if you let them, but it pays to check that you've set this up properly, and that you have your cloud account login detail stored somewhere safely so you can access your data if your device fails or gets lost.