Do you have a backup plan for your computer or digital storage device? If your computer or external hard drive fails (which it eventually will), do you have a way to easily recover your important data? This includes your documents, photos and applications as well as the system to run your computer.
Creating a backup plan is often the first thing that I tackle with new digital organizing clients. I can’t stress enough how important this is to do. I recently found out the hard way why you need a “belt and suspenders” backup plan. This means that your data is backed up in more than one way, in case one of them fails.
A bit of background first. In order to save storage space on my Mac hard drive and to consolidate all my important photos in one place, I moved them all to a 2TB external hard drive. (I regularly delete all my junk photos and videos, including screenshots, blurry pics, duplicates, etc.).
I organized all the photos and videos on the external hard drive by year and event, going back to scanned photos of my mother and father from the 1920s and 30s. There were also several precious home videos of my sons as little kids that had been transferred from their original Mini 8mm format. The hard drive is only about 2 years old, but for some reason, a few weeks ago, it completely failed. Although all my photos were still on it, I had no way to access them.
Fortunately, I use a great cloud backup plan called Backblaze to back up my entire computer to the cloud. I also plug in an external hard drive every couple of weeks to back up my Mac using Time Machine. It is important to note that Time Machine doesn’t back up anything that’s not on your Mac. This included all those photos that I had put on the external hard drive.
However, Backblaze also lets you back up external hard drives, USB flash drives or any other data storage device that is not being used for Time Machine. As I had been backing up my photo storage drive regularly on Backblaze, I was able to restore all my photos and videos within a couple of hours. They are now safely on a new external hard drive which I will continue to back up regularly on Backblaze without fail!
If you are interested in trying Backblaze, use this link to get a free month on me! You can also contact me to set up an appointment to get you backed up and worry free.
2 thoughts on “Why You Need a Digital Backup Plan!”
Useful Information! Backup Plan is necessary for everyone in digital work because when lost files it’s difficult to retrieve data like photos, videos on digital devices. In my case I used Stellar Photo Recovery software which help me to recover deleted files from digital devices such as external hard drive, SD card,Windows, etc.
Great to know of this resource – thanks!