March 31st was designated as world backup day (http://www.worldbackupday.com/) with a quite catchy slogan of "Don't be ab April fool". 

In corporate world backups tend to be taken care of quite nicely by corporate IT, however most of us are now storing significant amounts of data at home. Quite a lot of it has never been backed up, or at least not recently. I had a look earelir today what data I do have backed up and what I do not have backed up.  To say that I was a little bit disappointed with myself is an understatement.  Most of the critcal work related stuff is all backed up, Kudos to me.  However when it comes to music, or photos I stink. It doesn't look like I have backed up as much as I thought I had (fixed now).  

So in light of the world backup day have a look at your systems at home and make sure that you have a backup available of the things that are important (or other people will tell you are important) and back them up. 

Probably the easiest is to use a removable harddrive, but there are many online options available as well which can be quite attractive.  Just remember  sucking 30GB from the internet back down to your machine may take some time.  Also consider who will have access to your stuff whilst backed up in the cloud.  You may want to encrypt the data whilst you are at it.  

If you are backing up your stuff, well done. Make sure though that you can get it back again.  On occasion I get asked to recover data from drives that have not been used in years and years.  Sometimes that is a happy story, many times it is not.  Don't forget DVDs also degrade over time, so data stored on those may also ned to be rewritten every few years or so.  

For those of you that are the IT help for friends and family, I have your gifts for the year sorted out.  Buy them a harddrive so they can back up their stuff.  Many now have some backup software included.  Or set up an online backup service for friends and family. 

Happy backing up. 

Mark H