Statistics says that, every week, 140.000 Hard Drives crashes in US. Most of them unrecoverable and results in complete data lost! You may meet or not, but loosing some or all of your data in your computer
or phone, is not very uncommon. That may be due to hard disk failures, viruses/malwares, accidentally erasing by you or simply loosing it! At the end, you lost your 10 years old photographs and videos of your children, wedding, home works or working sheets. In order to prevent that kind of data looses, back up is the simplest and cheapest way. Data backup saves your time and money!
Basic rule in backup is taking the backups to a different physical media, other than current data media. I mean, taking backup of files in drive C:\ to other directory in drive C:\ is useless because when your hard drive (C:) died, both your files and backup directories is died! For this reason you should backup your data to external hard drives (or USB Drive ) or online backup cloud services.
Another important thing is backup software. There are many good (some paid, some free) backup and restore software available in the market.
Some of the Free backup software I advice and use are:
- Windows backup (type “backup” in search area in Windows 10/8/7)
- SyncBack Free
Cloud Backup Your Data
Also a good place for backups is Cloud backup services. Many Cloud backup services gives you at least 2 GB of free Cloud area and many of them have native backup software for their services. (if free services is not enough for you, you can buy more space too). Another advantage of online backup services is that, when you upload your files (photos, music, video etc.) to Cloud service, you can access them from any device and OS (PC, MAC, Linux, iPhone, tablet etc.)
- Google Drive – Free 15 GB of storage
- OneDrive – Free 15 GB of storage
- Dropbox – Free 2 GB of storage
- Amazon Drive – Free 5 GB of storage
If you are using a WordPress site, it’s a good idea to backup your site to a cloud service or local PC, which is described in Step-3 Backup Your Site with UpdraftPlus of How to Migrate WordPress Site to a New Domain Name article.