You can never have too many backups.  We have seen too many people and businesses lose everything.  Granparents losing 50 year old pictures, and all the pictures of their grandkids.  We've seen businesses lose 10 years of  data, accounting, and payroll .   Whats the solution?   Multiple backups. 

 

We recommend everyone have at least a 2 teir backup system.  At least one local backup, and a cloud backup.

 

A copy of your data stored locally on a Hard drive, flash drive, or other physical storage device.  This is handy for quick, on-hand data restoration,  file transfers,  or if you need to grab your data and go.

 

I can actually break this teir up into 2 groups,  file backup and image backup. In certain instances both of these can also be the same backup.

 

File backup 

A copy of your important files to an external device,  like a Hard drive or USB flash drive.

 

Image backup

An as-is copy of your computer everything included.  Operating System,  Installed programs, files, etc.  A full restorable image of your computer in its current condition.

 

For our local backups, we mostly use Paragon.  It does mich more than just backups, and is very simple to use.

 

 

Files are stored on a server with the Cloud storage company.  This is mindlessly easy and secure.  Set it and forget it.  A good service, like iDrive, will hold many incremented copies of your data, making it simple to restore data even if all your other backups become infected or lost.  Everyone should be using cloud backup.  Its affordable and easy.

 

We use and recommend Carbonite for this. Unlimited devices at a low yearly price.  This is a no brainer.