Q: We had a party at my place last weekend, and it almost got me in some very serious problem academically. I\u2019m not talking about disciplinary stuff–I\u2019m talking about my schoolwork itself. It\u2019s all on my laptop, which almost didn\u2019t survive the night. Yes, I know I should have been more careful when I set up for the party, but in the end I left my laptop out in my room, where people were tossing their bags and coats. It wasn\u2019t really supposed to be a big drinking spot, but people were wandering back there with their drinks anyway, and someone managed to spill beer on my laptop. Luckily, a friend told me right away. I wrapped it up in paper towels, dunked it in rice, the whole nine yards–I might have said a prayer or two, too. In the end, it started up fine and all of my hard work–including really important stuff for classes–was intact. But it was a scary moment, because I didn\u2019t have anything backed up! I want to start creating some backups, but I\u2019m not sure I trust \u201cthe cloud\u201d (I don\u2019t even understand how it works, really), and I don\u2019t know the first thing about any of this. Help!<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n
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A: So you\u2019re ready to back up your computer files–a smart decision! <\/span>Only 8% of us back up our data daily, and a full 25% never do so at all<\/span>.<\/span><\/a> But as you discovered, it only takes one scary incident to remind us of the importance of having all our key information and hard work in more than one place!<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n There are two basic ways to back up your data: on a storage system that you own, or on a storage system that somebody else owns. Let\u2019s start with the first one. When you back up your smartphone to your computer, the files of your smartphone are being stored in your computer–ready to be recovered if you need them later on. In a similar way, you can use an external hard drive to back up your entire computer. External hard drives are essentially just regular hard drives that have been put in cases and adapted to connect to your computer\u2019s USB port. Many of them come pre-loaded with programs designed to make the back-up process easy. You can leave them plugged in regularly or just connect them periodically when it\u2019s time to back up your data.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n The other major backup option is a cloud backup. The \u201ccloud\u201d may seem kind of vague and confusing, but it\u2019s actually just more storage–albeit storage that somebody else is holding onto. When you put something in the cloud, you use the internet to store it on a faraway storage device. Companies do this all the time, <\/span>the experts at Aligned Data Centers tell us<\/span><\/a>–it takes a pretty big company to run its own data centers, and until then, they back up their files and store their data just as you and I do: on someone else\u2019s system. Cloud storage has really caught on on the consumer side, <\/span>with 1,754 million of us using cloud storage and 2,309 million expected to do so by 2020<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n