An IT Professional’s Guide To Backing Up Your Data

So many people still don’t do this!

As an IT professional, I take a strong stance when it comes to backing up data. I’ve seen so many cases of laptops, SD Cards, hard drives and even cloud storage solutions fail people.

I’ve talked a lot about the importance of backing up over the years, but I keep seeing people lose data. From precious memories to documents and projects, if not backed up, it can be extremely easy to lose.

On top of that, experience has taught me that making a single backup copy of your data on a separate storage device is asking for trouble, and nothing proves this better than a recent experience I had.

I was looking for files from a project I was working on a few years ago. The main backup copy of this project was stored on a portable hard drive. I plugged the hard drive into my MacBook and nothing, I changed the USB cable and nothing, I even plugged the hard drive into my Windows PC. However, the hard drive was still not showing any signs of life.

Luckily, I had the project backed up in 3 separate locations including a second portable hard drive and the cloud, and I was easily able to access the files again.

That is why I seriously recommend using the 3–2–1 backup rule, and in this article…