When 90% of your time is spent working at your computer, finding a simple, effective way of backing up all of your files is a must. Whether you are a full studio / agency, or a freelancer, your income and livelihood will most probably be dependent on you being able to access the files that you created the day, week, or month before. Now, we are all all too familiar with the nightmare of forgetting to save a file and then the software kindly crashing on us, but just imagine if your entire hard-drive failed!
Most of you are already backing up your data in some way or another I’m sure, but here are 5 ways that you could potentially do it a little more effectively:
External (Offline) Storage
1. Time Machine
If you own a Mac, then Time Machine is definitely one of, if not the best option out there for external storage. It works with any hard-drive so you don’t have to buy Apple’s own Time Capsule and it automatically backs up all of your data on an hourly, daily, and monthly basis.
It is recommended that if you’re going to use Time Machine then you should buy an external drive that is twice the size of your computer’s. This is simply because of the sheer amount of data that it needs to store - just think how many files you work on / play / access in a day! I listened to this recommendation and bought a 1TB drive to back up my 500GB internal drive and it didn’t have any trouble filling up within a few months…
The great thing about it though, besides the sexy UI, is that once the hard-drive is full, it asks if you want to start overwriting the oldest files, so effectively you never run out of room. Mine has been doing this for a while now, but I can still reach over 6 months back into old files in case I lose something!
