The past week we’ve seen how easy it is to lose something, whether it’s property or important information. It remains crucial to have a backup plan – literally.

To ensure you have peace of mind, make a habit of backing up your data on a regular basis. Choose one day a week when things are a little less chaotic than usual, maybe a Friday and make an appointment in your diary to do a weekly backup.

Try not to overwrite your previous backup. Rather make consecutive copies in various folders on your external hard drive or on your network space and name each with the particular day’s date. If any of the documents become corrupt for some reason, you can always fall back on a previous version.

For official, university or work-related documents, your safest backup choice would be your network drive (usually the h-drive) or the departmental network drive (usually the g-drive). You have 1GB at your disposal to backup your most critical documents. At an extra cost of R10-00 per 1GB this space can also be increased. This network space is also available via the web at storage.sun.ac.za if you find yourself away from the SU network.

The departmental drive can be used for files used by more than one person and 15GB is allocated to each department. SharePoint can also be used by groups for sharing documents.

If you choose to have your data closer at hand, get yourself an external hard drive or even dvd’s (although the amount of data you can save on dvd is a bit limited). Just ensure that these devices are stored somewhere else (not also in your office) or in a safe. If confidential, US documents are kept on an external hard drive, files have to be protected with a password or encrypted. Keep in mind that if you DO lose the password, not even IT can salvage your data.

Never save important data on a flashdrive – it’s sole function is for transporting data from one device to another and is not a dependable medium for backup. If you do save data on it, make sure you have an additional backup method as well.

Regularly check that the medium on which you made your backup is still in working order and you’re able to access your documents. For the same reason use more than one backup medium, for example your network space AND an external hard drive.

Lastly cloud storage can be used, but ONLY for private information. No academic or sensitive information is to be saved on the cloud. Read more on cloud storage in our previous articles.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 27th, 2015 at 12:30 pm and is filed under Research, Security. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.