What is Your Data Backup Story?

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My lessons in backing up important data and files goes all the way back to Commodore 64 days where I was typing out a book called “World of Drakken”, I was about 7 years old and there was a thunderstorm outside in N.Y. a power outage that ensued caused me to lose all of my data and about 28 pages of my novel because I didn’t backup my document to a 5 1/4 inch floppy disk at the time.

Since then, I have always kept various backups, pack rat amounts of backups of my data.  It started with 3 1/2 inch disk backups, moved onto CD’s and then DVD’s.  I still have DVD’s burned in drawers with pictures and documents from back in 2001/2002 sitting in my office.  I don’t know why, I actually have everything now synced to various cloud services like Skydrive and Dropbox (double redundancy for some items).  I also have USB Sticks several with 64GB capacity and keep backups of my data on those devices as well.

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Anything I can’t replace easily, I ensure is backed up.  The only thing I no longer backup is my giant MP3 collection, I have only listened to about 20 out of my hundreds of mp3 files burned from CD’s I own over the years, but since switching to Spotify I don’t deal with backing up my music anymore.  Anything purchased on iTunes exists in the cloud, and Spotify handles the rest.  Actually my biggest issue now isn’t backing everything up but keeping all my backups in sync to make sure they are current, I have a lot of backups in various places that range from 3 weeks old to years old without having updated data and at some point I need to consolidate all of this.

What needs to be backed up continues to increase all the time, this is especially true for web site owners and bloggers who have files online as well as offline.  Don’t think your hosting provider by default backs up all your data and databases, you need to make sure you are proactive about backing that information up or  you could lose it.  When using a free blogging service like Blogger or WordPress.com the cloud is larger and chances of losing your data permanently are less than if you run a self hosted WordPress infrastructure.  I often consider whether or not I should procure Backup Server Systems or rely on manual backup or script based backups running on the servers themselves.  I have several WordPress plugins to handle backups and rely on some backup functionality and automation provided by my hosting provider but you never can be too careful.

Do You Have a Backup Story?

What stories do you have around backing up information or data, do you have a nightmare where you didn’t back something up and lost important data?  Or how about a story where you lost your original data and you were thankful you had done a data backup just a few days or weeks before?

Share your stories on how good or bad you are at keeping all your important data backed up and what backup methods you prefer whether it still be burning files to DVD, USB Flash drives, External Drives, cloud backup services or something else.

We are influencers and brand affiliates.  This post contains affiliate links, most which go to Amazon and are Geo-Affiliate links to nearest Amazon store.