World Back-Up Day!

Thursday 31^st March 2022 marks this year’s World Back-Up Day, which is a day in the calendar that serves to remind us all to protect all our digital wares. Whether that be documents for work, study, personal information, or photos of loved ones you want to keep saved, with how technological our society has become, it’s important to back-up everything that’s important to us. Having things saved just on your laptop or computer is step one, but here I’m going to go through a list of extra back-up options that you can utilise to ensure everything you have gets saved, and stays saved!

Backing-Up Online

The first port of call has to be backing up your documents online. Applications such as Onedrive, Google Drive and Dropbox are amazing because they’re associated with the internet rather than with one device. All you usually need is an e-mail address to use them! So even if you suddenly find that your phone AND laptop are out for the count, you can go into the University Library, or any library with computers, sign in, and you still have access to everything that you need! Plus, many of these applications are coming as standard with Microsoft accounts and so-on, so it’s probably the most accessible option in this techy world!

Memory sticks

Memory sticks, also known as USBs, are another method of backing things up that is incredibly useful! They’re often not too expensive, and you can buy them easily from both online retailers and stores in your local area – in Lincoln for instance, I know for a fact that the Wilkinson’s just off the High Street sells a number of of them on their top floor. Memory sticks are portable, easy to use, and you can even make them password protected if you’re concerned about added security! This is the sort of thing you can always keep at home and update as regularly as you like, and if you find yourself having to replace a laptop or computer then you have everything at the ready to upload!

Email Things To Yourself

Emailing things to yourself isn’t maybe something people think of to do, but it can be a really great method of backing things up! Since your e-mail inbox again isn’t limited to any device, it means you can sign in from anywhere if you need to quickly access work and your own devices aren’t working for you. Also, e-mail inboxes often have very useful organisational features such as starring, or even the ability to organise e-mails into different folders, which can make storing things incredibly useful and easy for you!

Email Things To Someone Else

Following on from e-mailing things to yourself, if you have a friend or family member that you trust (and who are willing), you can always e-mail them your work too! One thing that could be a nice and fun thing to do also is to e-mail each other your work, and go one step further and use the aforementioned back-up techniques for each other so you’re all doubled up and EXTRA backed-up!

Printing and Storing

Admittedly this is a more old-fashioned way of going about things, but it’s nonetheless effective! If it’s financially viable for you, and you have the storage space, every time you finish a significant draft of a document, or you’ve got more pictures you want to save, you can just print things off and file them away for safe keeping!

I hope you find these options useful, and though it might seem monotonous backing things up over and over again, it’s better to have things backed up than to risk losing what you’ve worked for, or things that mean a lot to you!