It’s March 31st, last day of the month, end of the first quarter and just some hours before April fools day. All of that makes it the perfect time for www.worldbackupday.com to remind the world to make backups.

But, ‘Why do we need a reminder for backups’? Well the fact is that as it may be true that everyone acknowledges that backups can save you, it’s still a lot of people who don’t pay enough attention to regularly and properly backup their important data. People either postpone it or neglect the good practices and this often results in painful fails when the time to restore a backup comes.

Location, location, location

Here are some advice on good practices for backups:
Backup location is critical. Many people backup on local storage, but that often fails. Backups are disaster recovery mechanism. So when ‘disaster’ disaster strikes, it’s important that your second chance is not connected in any manner to your original data. Local backup storage can often fail along with your working copy in case of some local disaster/malfunction/shared environment/electrical surge and so on.
If you really care about your data, store your backups on a remote location.

Automate it

Backups are only worth if they are current enough. So you really have to do them strict and regularly. It is common case when people come to the point where they need their backups and they simply see they can’t find anything beneficial in a backup that is old and outdated.
Automate your backups and schedule them on regular interval.

Test drill

Never rely blindly on the belief that as long as you backup you’re all safe now. Backups are only useful if you can actually restore them. And unfortunately practice shows a simple “Schrodinger’s cat” effect that you don’t know if a backup is good or bad before you actually try to restore it. So it’s always better to attempt that restore and find out the truth before you actually need it.
Test your backups restore procedure once every several backup intervals.

Keep an eye on our backups track for some practical ideas for backups.