Backup is a process that copies data to a storage device or media, typically in order to protect against data loss.
It is important to back up and save your data on a regular basis. You never know when an unexpected event might happen that could lead to data loss. This can be anything from a natural disaster, power outage, or human error.
There are many different ways to back up data. The most popular way is to use a cloud storage service such as Dropbox, i-Cloud, Google Drive, etc. These services will automatically backup your data for you and save it in the cloud for safekeeping.
It is important to back up your data as often as you can. It is not enough to just do it once or twice a year. You should back up your data every day or at least every week.
There are two main types of backups: full and incremental.
Full backups will make a copy of all the files in your machine while incremental backups will only copy the files that have been changed since the last backup.
Incremental backups are much faster than full backups, but it may take longer for you to restore your system if you need to revert back to an older version of your data.
As mentioned, you can save your data to a cloud service or you can also save your data to a local storage drive like a USB flash stick, external hard drive or an SD card.
There are also other devices that can be used to store your data over the Network like a Network Attached Storage (NAS) Device, these offer better protection of your data specially if they have redundancy which is the storing of the same data in multiple locations, some NAS devices come with more than one hard drive to protect the data.
Another option is a dedicated Storage Server which can hold large amounts of data with added redundancy and is used over the Network for shared disk access of files between several workstations. A Storage Server can also offer redundancy in the form of RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) which is a virtualization technology that combines multiple disk drives into one logical unit for the purpose of protecting the data and improving performance.
In conclusion,
Whichever option you decide works best for your situation, the best thing to do is to start backing up your data “now”, don’t wait so that when trouble arises you end up losing your files which can lead to a lot of wasted time and money, not to mention all the frustration that can come along with data loss.
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