External Memory - Backup Storage Policy

Technology has taken over the world in the past decades, and we cannot conceive a world without it. From schools, to worksites to our homes: everything is full of smartphones, tablets and computers. However, one my ask himself: How do I storage so much information, that in many cases is vital for my work, school or personal life? This is a question that all of us that work with technology should ask ourselves because we all know that nowadays there is no excuse if your computer breaks, since there are many ways to save your files.

In this blog post, I am going to explain what my backup policy is. I understand that everyone has his own personal backup policy, but I am going to explain how I do it, especially for computers, but some applications may be used for tablets and smartphones as well.

First of all, I would like to distinguish between the internal memory of the computer and the two main external memories that exist nowadays. The internal memory of a computer is the one that comes with the computer and which is located inside the computer. The internal memory has several components such as the RAM memory that increases the power of your computer, or the internal hard disks. The internal memory is certainly vital, but in case your computer breaks, the external memory hardware comes into place. This external memory devices, such as mentioned before, include the most portable, which are USB disks such as pendrives, and then bigger and more compact hardware such as the external memory drives that can store large amounts of data, normally 500 GB or 1 TB, but up to however knows.

Once knowing this, I am going to explain what I do to backup my data.

I am an Apple user, therefore I have a Mac. For this reason, I have a wonderful program called Time Machine which comes very handy at the time of making security backups of your entire computer. What I usually do, is once a week, normally during weekends, is opening up Time Machine at the same time that I connect my 500 GB external hard drive to the computer, in order for Time Machine to produce a new security backup of my computer and storing this new data once again, but updated, to the external memory disk. This process can take a long time if you have not done backups in a while and you ha a lot of new information, but if you do it every week, it should only be a matter of 5 minutes or less, and it is totally worth it.

In the highly unlikely chance that both my internal memory and external memory hardware breaks, I once again weekly, store what I consider my most important files in iCloud, therefore I can open up these files in my other devices just in the case of an extreme situation. 

Lastly, in the even higher unlikely chance of a failure in the iCloud server and the breaking of both my internal and external memories, I store the most important files of the week as well in Dropbox, since I have the Dropbox application in my computer, and it is honestly very easy and fast to store those files.

So here is my backup policy. What I believe that everyone should remember is that it is important to do at least one backup a week in at least an external memory drive in order to have your information secure and in hand in the case of an emergency.

I hope you have found this post useful!