When was your last backup? If you answer is anything longer than an hour ago  you probably don’t have an effective backup strategy! If you can’t remember when you ast did a backup hope to it and do something about it right now.

For many a USB thumb drive or external hard drive is the strategy of choice. Unfortunately the former is all to easily lost and the latter you need to remember to do it.  Fortunately there are lots of great products around that can do backups on a schedule for you, with many now offering incremental backups. Incremental backups take a snapshot of your hard drive and record changes made every hour or so. Incremental backups are a great tool if you are doing some document intensive work and need to recover an earlier version – it can easily save you a days work.

For many home and small business Network Attached Storage (NAS) is a very affordable solution that can backup multiple computers. A good NAS system has multiple drives mirroring each other , so that in the event of drive failure you don’t use any data.

Cloud systems are recently becoming popular, because all you need to is sign up to a service (google drive, dropbox etc..), you do need a reliable data connection though, there are storage limits and data security is also an important consideration (get out your tin foil hat). How you manage data amongst a team is also important. The big plus for cloud storage is usually for a modest annual fee everything is taken care of, with no hardware to invest in. Cloud storage gets around the systemic risk of damage to the premises of your place of business.

A good NAS coupled with an external hard drive that you take home once a week is a preferred solution of many business and relatively easy to setup too.