We all rely on data to help us get our job done and enhance our life. Think of business documents, personal pictures, source code for software projects, tax receipts or health records. Some of this data now lives in the cloud. You can sync your pictures or keep your source code on Github. This has left many of us with the impression that someone else is responsible for keeping our data safe.

Since you are reading this, you probably know better. Cloud accounts can be blocked or compromised. Syncing something is not a backup, because deletions are synced as well. Even well-run data centers can burn down.1 That’s why backups are still important if you have any kind of data that’s important. Just consider this: if file or folder X was gone. Would it bother you? Could you still do your job effectively? If the answer is yes for any data you keep on your Macbook, then read on.

Having a structured backup strategy will not just save your precious family pictures, but also ensure business continuity. This article has a list of practical steps and generic templates you can use to make this task as simple as possible.
Goals

After completing the steps in this article, you will have the following:

1. A list of your data assets.
2. Where they are located and how they are backed up.
3. Identified common errors regarding backup correlations, security and frequency.

Backups vs. Archives

This article will mainly discuss Backups, rather than Archives. The main difference between the two:

• Backups are a copy of production data that’s frequently updated without changing the source data. Main challenge is to keep up with changing source data and restore quickly if needed.
• Archives are generally accessed less frequently and the source data is deleted after creating the archive. E.g. tape storage with old accounting data. Main challenge is longevity of the data medium. //

Backup Strategy Template on Google Drive ↩ ↩

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1cuTM849Fu6palPUG5SgUJrzw2J4z_hq71g-jZPY4hcw/edit?usp=sharing