Why this matters
Hard drives fail, laptops are stolen from cars, phones fall into gutters, power surges kill machines and ransomware locks files. Every one of these is a disaster without a backup and an inconvenience with one. Ghanaian IT officer and support adverts list data backup and recovery, disaster recovery and business continuity. For a small business, a school or an NGO with donor reports, a tested backup can be the difference between a bad day and losing years of records.
The three copies rule
A simple rule used widely in IT is often called 3 2 1:
- Three copies of important data: the original and two backups.
- Two different kinds of storage, for example the laptop's drive and an external drive, or an external drive and cloud storage.
- One copy kept somewhere else, away from the office or offline, so fire, theft or ransomware cannot destroy every copy at once.
An external drive that stays plugged in all the time is better than nothing, but ransomware can reach it. Unplug it after each backup, or rotate two drives.
What to back up
Focus on what cannot be replaced: documents, spreadsheets, accounts records, photos, databases, email if it is stored only on the device, and settings for important systems. Programs and Windows itself can be reinstalled, so they matter less.