How to lose your valuable data or why Google Drive, OneDrive, iCloud and Dropbox aren't backups

Ever lost any family pictures or videos or documents? I sincerely hope not, but the reality of the increasing level of digitization is that we have an ever increasing amount of digital assets and memories spread over our digital companions. Most of us use tools such Google Drive and iCloud to automatically upload our pictures and videos to cloud drives in case of loss of our devices. Similarly many of us use platforms like OneDrive, Dropbox, iCloud etc to keep our documents in the cloud so we can access them from anywhere anytime and synchronize across multiple devices. So far, so good and these are all very useful features, no argument.

But what if one of your important files, pictures or videos was deleted by accident by you, your children, or a overly aggressive “cleanup” programme such as the ones we have on our PC’s and phones? What if one of these files gets corrupted as you are trying to edit it, get overwritten by accident? Has that ever happened to you? Well, it happens to the best of us and all is fine IF you have a backup - the word “IF” being the key here.

So no, all these wonderful and helpful assistants and cloud drives are very useful but they are NOT A BACKUP. A backup lets you go back in time, let’s you see different versions of a document that you had and lets you restore previously deleted, corrupted or otherwise affected digital assets. It’s an insurance to cover you should things go wrong, something you can always fall back upon.

In life we insure many things, our health, car, house, travel, and a lot more. So, if your digital documents, pictures, videos and other artifacts are so valuables are so important to you, back them up using a real backup solution. One that allows you to store your data safely and privately in the cloud with a key that only you have access to, but that you can access from anywhere, anytime if you need it and restore your files or even your entire system if you need to. Backup solutions are available for PC’s, NAS systems, servers and much more. Let’s stop losing our digital assets and start insuring ourselves with a backup.

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