Don't be like Carrie Bradshaw and keep your backup updated
Don't Be Like Carrie Bradshaw and Keep your Backup Updated
Today the term "backup" is quite familiar, or at least it should be... but are we being responsible using it and taking care of our data security?
It was 2002, the new millenium had just begun and Carrie Bradshaw was already popular across the globe over both sides of the Athlantic. The famous main character of Sex and the City took to letting us know her daily life in a column section in the newspaper, writing them out on her computer.
Then one afternoon like any other, she was typing things out when all of a sudden, the screen of her Mac turned blue. Does it ring a bell? Well, it didn't, it was completely unknown at least for her, so she started panicking and became even more nervous after her boyfriend started fidgeting with the computer but came up unsuccessful. So she resorted to the technical support. That's when the specialist informed her that there had been a system error and asked her about her last backup.
Although the anecdote can be funny in retrospective, it's not something to joke about, since the computer could not be recovered and she lost all the information she stored there, including everything she had written on it. That when Carrie's face turned white pale; "I don't do that" she answered, however both her couple Aidan and her friend Miranda knew perfectly well the importance of doing a backup, something that Carrie blamed them for for not discussing it ever. "No one talks about backing up, you've never used that expression with me before, ever. But apparently everybody's secretly going home at night and backing up their work", lamented Carrie.
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"Sooner or later everyone will understand the benefits of keeping a backup stored, some might do it before a data disaster, but others afterwards" claimed T.E.Ronnenberg.
You dear reader who are reading this article might not have experienced a disaster or huge inconvenience like this one... or maybe you did and in that case, we hope you were cautious.
Both in terms of work and private life issues, if you really appreciate the information you're handling it is essential to do your best in guaranteeing its security. Following the same procedure for ensuring you lock the door and store everything away when you leave home for vacation, the information you deal with also needs a "safe" and that's when the backup comes in handy.
Bradshaw's case is not the only one at all related to the screen. In fact, Toy Story 2 productors experienced by themselves the importance of keeping an updated backup stored. At the time, backups were quite limited in most cases. The movie could be "saved" only because Galyn Susman, the supervisor technical director at the time had been working remotely and she had a backup of the movie at home, otherwise they would have needed to start the movie again almost from scratch and the consequences and damages would have been catastrophic.
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How long ago was your last backup?
According to a recent survey from Kingston Technology, 76% of the Spanish users have lost relevant information for not keeping a backup. It is actually a very simple step that should become part of our routine, but even though people know the risks they face, most of them have never done a backup.
It's true that backing up absolutely everything can be unfeasible, given the amount of information we manage on a daily basis, but we still should set some clear priorities.
Business related critical information, as well as the information required by the law and by agreements with third parties should be backed up every once in a while, as well as all the information essential to keep business continuity, as they remind us at INCIBE.
What types of backup are there?
Depending on how important the data we want to save are, there are different kinds of backup, as expplained by INCIBE.
- Full backup: Consists in backing up everything that was previously considered essential. It is the first and most comprehensive backup and does not require any additional tools.
- Incremental backup: It is a process that requires a higher level on the different backup stages, since it backs up files taking into account the changes made since the last backup. It is an action that it is not recommended to carry out manually.
- Differential backup: It is based on the basic structure of the progressive backup, it backs up only the files that were modified in any way, with the difference that in this case all files created since the last full backup will be backed up again too.
- Mirror backup: It creates an identical data backup in real time.
These might interest you...
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When a Poor Backup Almost Deprives us of Toy Story 2