In today’s digital age, where our lives are increasingly intertwined with technology, protecting our valuable information has become more crucial than ever. Many valuable memories, documents, photos, videos, projects, and personal files can be lost due to accidents, hardware failures, viruses, or cyberattacks. This is why having regular backups is so important.

Don’t be an April Fool. Backup your 2023 data on World Backup Day on the 31st March.

A backup, or data backup is a copy of computer data – for example family photos, videos, documents and emails. Instead of storing it all in one place, leaving it open to loss, theft or corruption, a copy is taken and stored elsewhere so that it may be used to restore the original following data loss.

One small incident or malfunction could wipe all your precious memories in one swipe. When was the last time you printed photos? Last month? Last year? Maybe just a couple of selected ones but the rest are left on the phone they were taken on. Imagine the phone gets lost and there was no cloud backup? Imagine how easy it is to lose a single tiny memory card containing thousands of photos. Keep these precious moments safe by backing them all up, in particular following the 3-2-1 backup rule. It could be what keeps your memories safe for years to come.

The gold standard for backing up is to follow the 3-2-1 backup rule:

Every day we create important documents, take pictures, videos, music and much more – some of these you may need for a business presentation next day, or they can be memories that you have created with your family and friends which you want to keep forever. The key when backing up your files is to select the right type of storage for the right job. We have put together an overview of different storage types to help you backup your data in the most effective and efficient way.

Due to their small physical size and ease of use, USB Drives and Memory Cards are the best devices for moving data from one location to another and also for temporary storage. However with their limited capacities and data lifetime expectations of only 5-10 years, they are not recommended for backup or archiving.

Optical Media is the ideal choice for long term Disc Writers archiving of important documents, pictures or videos – in fact any files that you need to store safely and cannot afford to lose. Combined with one of Verbatim’s slim and compact External Disc Drives, you can easily plug in and create long-term backups of all your essential files.

SSDs, like USBs, utilise flash storage making them fast, durable, compact and energy efficient and available at higher capacities. SSDs are also better at handling drops, shocks and everyday wear and tear, making them less prone to experience data loss and suitable for larger, day-to-day, moveable backups.

Where larger storage capacities are needed, Verbatim Hard Drives are the perfect day-today backup and storage devices. Being more affordable per terabyte than SSDs, hard drives are generally available in much larger capacities. Portable HDDs are compact and lightweight, ideal for on-the-go backup whilst desktop HDDs are useful for more regular, desktop storage.