Why you need to back up your files and photos

Nothing lasts forever and that is especially true of your digital devices. The storage inside your computer will eventually wear out, your laptop will eventually give up the ghost, and you can never know for sure that today isn’t the day when your phone will have an unfortunate encounter with the pavement. So it is important to make sure that all of your most precious digital data, like photos from your camera app and any important documents, are safely backed up!

Information security professionals typically say that the rule of thumb to stay safe is the “3-2-1” strategy: You should aim to store three different copies of your most important files, in two different formats, with one held off-site. 

So for most home users, this basically translates to a strategy of having one extra copy stored on another device in your home, and then storing another in the cloud—in addition to the originals on your computer or phone. 

And the good news is that these days, it is possible to stay backed up relatively painlessly. 

For your home backup, the easiest thing to do is to get hold of a suitably large external USB hard drive. You’ll want something at least a little bit larger than the total size of the drive inside your computer. From here, you can copy files manually—but this is slow and tedious. Or you can automate the process. 

On Windows, this is called simply “Backup” and it is found is Settings. On Mac, it is called “TimeMachine”. You can configure your computer so that whenever you plug in the drive, it automatically synchronises the contents of your computer onto the external drive. 

Similarly, if you don’t mind spending the money (starting at around £400, not including the hard disks), an even better device to buy is a NAS—or “Network Attached Storage”. This is effectively a miniature computer that connects to your home network, and will keep you seamlessly backed up in the background. Even better, most NAS devices can take multiple hard disks, meaning that you can effectively have a back-up of your back-up at all times, so that if the NAS dies, you don’t lose your backup too.

Arguably more important is your Cloud backup. For your phone, this is probably automatically built into your phone, and can be configured in Settings. Simply put, when you put your phone on charge at night, it will securely zip up to Apple’s or Google’s servers a copy of everything on your phone (depending on if you have an iPhone or an Android device). 

For photos specifically, both Apple and Google’s official photos apps have cloud synchronising functionality, meaning that when you snap a photo, it’ll automatically be uploaded to the cloud next time you connect to wifi. Which is a great way to have peace of mind. Just make sure you’ve enabled it in your Settings app!

One final note about cloud backup—if you’ve got a lot to keep safe, then you might run out of cloud storage space. But in this case, I’m a strong advocate of paying for more storage. Typically, this won’t break the bank too much (Apple’s storage is £10/month for two terabytes, which is…a lot of space), but considering we’re talking about some of your most important things here, I think it is well worth gritting your teeth and stumping up the cash.