What was that again? Woke up to message from tech services that today is World Backup day!

A day dedicated to thinking about backing up your files on all technology devices onto an alternate storage. Made perfect sense.

Happy World Backup day!

How often do we backup our files.. especially personal ones..?

If there is a default backup utility setup with our machines or at work, our files, emails and all other documents are automatically backed up. Otherwise, it becomes a manual activity, typically the last one on the list.

All of us have at some point of time lost all files on our computers – especially on days we needed them the most. What all files get lost with it, we never even know.

Creating a process around backing up your files on your system, be they emails, critical documents, pictures, legal documents, etc are important.

While we get used to 1 TB drive space in our laptop / desktop computers, 1 TB backup space on our cloud storage, 16/32/64 GB or more phone storage and backup flexibility.. it may be time to prioritize what we choose to backup and how frequently we need to do the same. Not everything we work on needs to be backed up, we end up letting the system choose it for us, or forget doing it at all.

Old pictures: Pictures of memories with friends and families, vacations, reunions, get togethers, all parties, we want to retain these memories for a long time. Earlier, we used to take one picture and get a printout to store them in an album. Now, to capture a moment, we end up taking 10-50 pictures and all of them are stored on our mobile devices. Choose the 1 picture to capture the moment and purge the rest. Saves the cost of storage space over time. Also, sorting them by year and putting it on one backup storage place makes it easier to retrieve them. Having a family folder to retain one copy of the family pictures and everyone having the ability to view it as needed makes it easier too. Do not need to keep backing it up on the phone, google files, one drive and additional cloud storage and on everyone’s storage space as well.

Legal documents: Store it physically in one place and have the digital files locked with a security password to have them stored on cloud storage. This includes copies of loans, mortgage, license, registration, deeds, titles, wills, trust, taxes etc etc.

Project work: Whatever work we do, we have the tendency to store a copy for our records later. Even after decades, while we seldom try accessing these files, they just remain in our backup drives. Any files that you are not accessing it over a decade, especially on the work front, see if you can just retain samples of your work for your memories. Chances are that if you have needed them for decades, the technology around how work is done now has changed completely and you might not need all the details around it as much.

Try to retrieve your backup files once in a while and test whether the process works. Else, you might lose access to your important documents without having a way to access them again.

Spending at least 30 minutes to consciously backup your files, goes a long way!