About once a year, I nag all of you to back up your important stuff. It’s not because I have nothing better to write about, it’s usually because I’m working with someone whose computer crashed. (Sometimes that someone is me.) If there’s a good, recent backup then it’s a matter of putting in some effort, but without that backup it’s a lot of handwringing and sadness.
Bobby’s first kindergarten assembly? GONE.
All your tax records since 1997? GONE.
That home movie you took just before Nana passed away? GONE.
And seriously, gone means gone. If you have your important photos, videos, documents, even music stored on one hard drive and that hard drive breaks then you have lost the documentation of your life. It’s just as simple as that.
In the old days, you couldn’t make copies of every photo, every record, every video tape or reel of film. If your memories were lost in a fire that was the end of that. Today it’s easier, but of course it takes one simple step: you have to actually do it.
Buy a big flash drive or external hard drive. Write a bunch of CDs if you’re retro. Subscribe to a cloud service. To paraphrase Oleta Adams, I don’t care how you get there, just get there if you can. There are so many ways to preserve that important stuff… just do it.
And don’t just do it once. Get in the habit. PCs and Macs have automatic backups, called File History and Time Machine respectively, that will constantly back up your files to portable hard drives. It’s easy to set up and hard drives are ridiculously cheap. Once every quarter, once every six months, whatever, copy your important stuff somewhere else. I mean somewhere outside your house. Give a backup to a family member or put it in a bank vault, or put it up on your Google Drive or OneDrive or Dropbox or whatever. The point is you have to do it.
What about cloud backups?
Yes, it’s true. Your phone probably backs up to the cloud. This means that your photos are safer than they would have otherwise been. If you have Windows 10 or 11 and use OneDrive, you’re backing that up to the cloud as well. But is that enough? No it isn’t. Don’t outsource your important stuff to a company that doesn’t care about you. That cloud backup is great, but if you really care about something, make a real physical backup of it. Otherwise, you could end up like one of my family members.
I tried to help one of my family with a laptop problem. They thought they were backing everything up to OneDrive, but they hadn’t noticed that Microsoft needed them to authenticate, about a year ago. They lost everything in that year, including some work stuff that was pretty important.
On the other hand, a family member came to me with a 2-month-old laptop that had already totally failed. This person lives in a rural area with slow internet, so cloud backups seemed like a bad idea. I’d set it up initially, so I took a backup when I finished. So while a little bit of data was lost, it wasn’t much. Decades of important information didn’t disappear and that’s the point.
Physical backups for your phone?
You can backup your phone or tablet, too. Usually it’s automatic when you sync to a PC, but if it isn’t, just make sure all the photos and music you have stored are copied off. Because right now you know someone who dropped their phone and lost everything on it. I guarantee it. It might even be you.
This doesn’t need to be an all-consuming passion, just make sure the important stuff is stored somewhere. Make a few copies of the really, really important stuff and put them in different places. It only takes a few minutes…
…and hopefully you’ll never have to say “I’m glad I did.”
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