When things go wrong, you need a dependable backup to save the day. There are plenty of ways to accomplish this, so there is no excuse to not have a backup. Whether for personal or professional reasons, these are the tools you should depend on the most.

1. External Hard Drive

Like most IT professionals, IT support Sydney has seen a fair share of external hard drives. These little wonders come in many forms depending on their usage. They can be portable, fast with an SSD, faster with an NVME or spacious like a traditional mechanical drive. There is a sweet spot in between spacious and speedy, and it seems portable SSDs are the new leader. But when large amounts of data need to be backed up, a portable SSD can get pricey. Move to a larger traditional external drive, and you lose speed but gain better price per TB. External hard drives are made to be flexible with your data, so a mixture of multiple types is always the right choice.

2. Cloud

On a setup that has a stable landline connection, cloud backups have seen a growth. There are several hosts that backup your data for free while offering a premium option to store extra data. The options for backup are robust, and fit a lot of niche use cases related to scheduling. The limitations with cloud backup will always be tied to the internet, or its stability. This is why cloud backup is often used in addition to other types of backups. The hit to your system resources is minimal, and you still manage to get two full copies of important data.

3. Shadow Copy

Shadow copying is a feature built into Windows that has been expanded by third party software. No matter which tool you use, shadow copying keeps its basics intact. The feature makes a backup of your drive while you’re using it. This revolutionary backup method is meant to give a 1:1 copy of a drive that can be restored to its original state if anything goes wrong. Since it can copy according to volume, the feature opens better ways to copy multiple drives at once.

4. Flash Drive

This is as portable as you’ll get when it comes to external backups. Flash drives used to have limited sizes, but are now capable of holding an entire operating system on a single stick. They are small enough to be attached to a keychain, and with compression can hold several TBs of data.

5.Smartphones

In an emergency, a smartphone can be used to backup important files. Simply plug it into a computer to drag and drop the necessary files into a folder. Most flagship phones will automatically detect when you plug them into a desktop. This backup option provides the smallest amount of space, and will most likely be limited to 256 GBs of data – this is based on the average space in a modern top tier smartphone. It sounds crude in practice, but an entire company can be saved if the right data is transferred to a smartphone for safekeeping.

Keep It Safe

Data falling into the wrong hands is bad for business. But data disappearing is even worse, and makes the situation even harder to explain. By using a reliable backup, you’ll be able to keep data safe at all times.