Every March 31, the world of computer security reminds us to back up the information we have on PCs , Tablets and smartphones.
In many parts of the world, April 1st is a key date for computer security . With “April Fool’s Day” – “Dia del tonto” equivalent to “Día de los Inocentes” on December 28 -, many practical jokes occur on the Internet, ranging from false news to malware distributed through social networks with the intent to harm our teams. Due to this custom , the international computer security community recommends making a backup one day before. This is how “Backup Day” was born .
The World Backup Day website proposes this habit as a prevention against the jokes of the next day, but also as a call to attention to the lack of interest of the average user in preserving their most valuable information: “It is not just a day to make a backup of your personal data, but also a day to talk about the enormous task of preserving our increasingly digital heritage and our cultural works for future generations.”
According to statistics from the site, three out of ten people have never made a backup of the most important files that are stored on their phone or computer. In addition, it mentions that 113 phones are lost or stolen every minute in the world, and one in ten computers is infected with viruses every month.
What is a backup and why should you do it?
When we talk about “Backup”, we are talking about a group of files that we need to have backed up in another safe place in case our equipment suffers damage. That way, if something happens to us, we can recover most of the information.
There are two obvious degrees to backup:
First time. The first time you make a backup you must understand that you should not copy your entire PC. There are system files that can be recovered when we reinstall Windows, so you don’t need to take that copy with you. What you should copy are: documents, photos, videos, audios and files that you work on frequently. It includes the “downloads” folder just in case.
Frequent. In this case, you should already be familiar with programs to copy only the new documents that you produce on a daily basis. Many of them come on the external hard drives you buy, so put them to good use. Try to password protect them and put them in a safe place. If your computer has an additional hard drive tray, add a few for a faster transfer.
In some cases, the easiest thing to do is to get an external hard drive and copy all the files in one go. It is a process that can take hours due to some variables, such as the type of hard drive or the size of the information to be transferred, as well as the speed of the USB port that we are using at that moment. For a faster process, try to get solid state drives or external SSDs, since their speed and resistance are greater. Remember to be careful in the settings for PC and Mac.
Here my hard drive recommendations for work at home.
The ones I personally use:
On the PC I use network and video surveillance disks to gain writing speed:
Firecuda SSD M2 PCIe 520 – main drive
Seagate Skyhawk 4TB
WD Red 4TB
I currently use these as external drives:
WD Passport Wireless 4TB – to take with me –
Seagate Plus Hub 4TB – for the desktop –
Patriot PXD 1TB – for copies from cell phones
The ones you could get:
WD 8TB Elements Hard Drive USB 3.0
Seagate Portable 5TB Hard Drive USB 3.0
LaCie 4TB Rugged – shock and water resistant –
Samsung Portable SSD 500GB USB 3.1
SanDisk 1TB Extreme Portable SSD USB-C
WD MyPasport GO SSD 500GB
Lacie Portable SSD 1TB
Another viable solution is the cloud. It is the heaviest process, but if we mechanize the activities, we can manage to do it efficiently and almost automatically. Systems like Google Drive, OneDrive and others have desktop apps that allow copying only new . In addition to copying your files from your phone or PC, there are multiple services that perform backups: