Best Backup Practices

In this day in age our lives have become increasingly digital.  Your un-replaceable photos, your taxes and business records, payroll, banking information, client records, business documents, it's all on your computer. Everyone knows they should have a backup of their data right?  If you're manually copying your files over to your USB drive you should be good right?  Well Kind of...

You see the problem with only backing up to your external HD is that your data is still vulnerable to fire, viruses, theft, storms, lightening/surges, etc.  By having only 1 backup located in the same place as your prime source you really are only protected against accidental deletion of the occasional computer crash.  There are so many other events that you're not protected against that could result in a complete loss of your data.   

You need to plan for redundancy.  

Most experts recommend the 3-2-1 backup for valuable data.  1 Local backup for your data that allows rapid recovery of your system.  2 A cloud backup at a remote location, odds are low that a natural disaster affecting your computers here would affect the cloud.  3 a permanent archive on CD/DVD archive grade disks possibly stored in a safety deposit box.  Having 3 backups of your most valuable data will ensure that at least one copy survives any scenario!