How to Chalk Out a Personal Plan for Data Storage and Backup

Just because cloud backup and storage gives you an easy, super-efficient option to store your data, it doesn’t always mean that the cloud solutions just rendered hardware useless. I still don’t trust any one vendor so much that I’d dump all my files, data, and years of work into any one cloud back-up solution. On the other hand, I am not stupid enough to refuse to at least one of the many solutions available for secondary or tertiary backup options.

No matter what your choice of software or hardware is, it makes sense take a strategic approach to data storage and backup. Here’s how we can draw up a plan, in phases related to data backup and storage:

Decide what’s important and what’s not

There’s a lot of data we all deal with everyday. While we might tend to believe that almost all of the data we deal with is important, it’s not. Relegate simple levels of importance as the following:

You might find that you wouldn’t need to go beyond a few folders on your Hard Drives (synced to your External Hard Drives). It’s the permanent data that you’d have to focus more for tiered storage across levels.

What goes where?

After demarcating types of data, think about what you’d do with temporary data (this can stay on your Hard Drives, emails, Google Docs, Dropbox, etc.,). For permanent storage, you may refer to the rough plan show below. If you may, you can have a separate sequence of storage for movies, videos, music, and photos. Documents can take a parallel route. Perhaps, you’ll want to consider totally another parallel plan for business purposes.

Hybrid storage and Data backup plan

Take a look at the pyramid structure of data backup below:

As you can see, the first tier of storage is understandably the permanent hard drives that come with your PC and Mac. Immediately link at least two high-speed (WD Thunderbolt Series, anyone?) external Hard Drives. An automated backup solution such as Apple Time Machine links easily and automatically to a Western Digital My Passport – a simple plug and play affair that I use, at this level.

As another option, Western Digital has personalized cloud storage  up to 1-2TB with Gigabit Ethernet connective, compatible with the Mac OS X, provides automated backup, remote access to data, and also features mobile apps.

Cloud backup ought to kick in at this level of your storage needs. After your first base is achieved with your permanent drives and EHDD (External Hard Disk Drives), it’s time to move to the cloud. Depending on your needs, you can start (and stay with the free options as I wrote earlier) with any of the options that you ‘d like. At this level, you can have at least one other vendor and/solution as a backup.

Experiment with your options

Starting from the hardware and all the way through to your choices for online cloud storage and backup, you have options aplenty. Read up reviews on all your options and try to narrow down your choices. It’s not easy but putting in this effort for this much needed due diligence saves you money, effort, and possible loss of data.

Do you store data at random or do you have a plan?

Let us know. We’d love to hear from you.