
This is a friendly reminder to backup your important files because today is World Backup Day.
Which of these emojis best represents you and how you feel about your data?
Do you play 🐣backup chicken 🐣by telling yourself that you’ll back it up NEXT TIME and hoping that nothing goes wrong until then?
When did you last save and backup your important documents? Do you have a back up plan?
For an author, or anyone in this digital age, backups are easy to overlook. But they’re essential. Just he idea of losing a manuscript has caused me to wake up in a panic in the middle of the night more than once.
I know from experience how hard a data loss can be. At one time, I had three back up drives fail at the SAME TIME.😱 One was a mirrored RAID. I was able to get my data back thanks to some tech friends. But it was certainly stressful. Another time, I was working on illustrations saved on an external HD because I was using two different machines. I guess the drive got moved too much while it was moving and the data was just gone. I can’t even talk about those small USB drives. UGH. So now I might be a bit manic about backing up. Maybe too much.
It’s never too late to take care of important documents and data and start good backup habits. Do I trust cloud storage? To a point. But I no longer rely on only one type of back up. I have Time Machine, I send my novel manuscript through my email to track updates. I back up to One Drive and Google Drive. But the battle for space vs my data is never ending. I also use MacPaw’s Clean My Mac to keep my hard drive organized. I resisted Clean My Mac for so long and I wish I hadn’t. It helped me clear up 80GB of wasted space on my hard drive.
Sometimes the problem with backing up data is the overwhelm from sheer clutter. One of my favorite resources for digital declutter is ✅ Digital Declutter: The BIG Checklist to Obtain Digital Minimalism by D.M. Elliot. ✅ She breaks it down to manageable chunks.
How do you manage your data backups?