The Three Copies Approach to Backing Up Your Computer
Monday, May 2, 2011 at 2:28PM 
Backing up your computer is the most important single action you can take to protect your computer data. You need to be extra diligent in ensuring that your valuable family pictures, home movies, music, and important documents, are safe.
Jiffy-PC recommends the "three copies" method for backing up your data. In other words, you should have three different copies of your files in three different places: on the computer, off the computer, and off site or online. This will guarantee that if something happens to your computer or the location where your data is stored, there will be at least one copy that survives. Lets take a look at each of the three locations and how you can easily set them up for yourself.
1 - On The Computer (Local)
This is the simplest of the three copies to keep, the original file. There is always going to be at least one copy of your file and that's the one that is on your computer right now. This locations should always be available to you should the other two methods become unavailable. Keeping this copy requires no set-up or maintenance, as long as you're saving files to your local computer, you've already got this part covered!
2 - Off the Computer (External)
The next copy you should have of your data is on an external hard drive attached to your main computer. These can be purchased at your favorite electronics retailer relatively inexpensively. This is normally the default method people use to backup their data and they stop here. But what happens if, heaven forbid, something should happen to the room your computer is in or to your entire house? Disasters happen, and that's why it's important to keep one more copy of your data that resides in a completely different physical location, far away from your computer.
3 - Offsite or Online
The easiest and most common way for home users to backup to an off-site location is via online backups. These files will be copied over the internet and stored at a secure data-center in another part of the country. In most cases, this is the most secure place to keep your data, but because of availability concerns (if your internet connection is down, you don't have access to these offsite files) you still want to make sure you're backing up locally as well.
Jiffy-PC offers a comprehensive backup solution that utilizes the Three Copies Approach to ensure your data is sufficiently protected. Contact us today to set-up a free evaluation of your backup needs!
Reader Comments (1)
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