Top 5 Tips for Smart & Efficient Backups

Face it – your life revolves around your computer. Whether it’s your family photos, work files or your personal documents, if your computer were damaged or destroyed you would be up a creek with everything you would lose. That’s why you should regularly back up your system.

Backing up your computer’s files is the only way to ensure you protect yourself against system breakdowns, online attackers and viruses. Here are our top five tips for how to back up your system.

1. Backup regularly. The more you work on your computer, the more often you should back it up. If you’re a daily computer user, you should backup your files daily, or at least weekly. Those who use their computers less frequently should backup at least once a month.
2. Use dedicated software. It takes a lot of time to do backups manually, so use dedicated software that schedules and backs up your system automatically. To speed things up, make sure that your program knows to only update changed files.
3. Encrypt your backups. This is important to do so that even if your backups were compromised they would be indecipherable and useless to the attacker. You should do this particularly with sensitive data like financial records or personal identity information like social security numbers, passport numbers or driver’s licence number that can lead to identity theft.
   Your most important data (1-10 Gb) should be kept in two backups – a local backup on an external hard drive as well as in a secure location in the cloud.
4. Use two-tiered backups. Your most important data (1-10 Gb) should be kept in two backups – a local backup on an external hard drive as well as in a secure location in the cloud. Other less critical data should be backed up locally. It’s important to use removable and/or external hard drives for backing up, as opposed to drives that are always connected to your system. This way your backup is protected from accidental deletion and malware threats like CryptoLocker (a type of malware that encrypts user data in an effort to hold it ransom; even if the CryptoLocker infection is removed, data is often irretrievably damaged) and other similar threats.
5. Your smartphone needs backing up too. If you set your account up properly, the cloud services associated with your smartphone that back up your contacts, photos, etc., offer some protection. But they aren’t the most secure services out there, and don’t cover things like your text messages. And the more we access and carry vital documents on our smartphones the more critical it is that we secure them, so getting extra protection for your smartphone cloud storage is increasingly important.

If the thought of doing all of this backing up yourself – or finding disparate services that can do it for you – sounds daunting, the good news is that Kaspersky’s PURE 3.0 Total Security can handle all of the backup needs for your computer. That includes regular backups that selectively backup only updated files so your system continues to perform with maximum efficiency, while also providing encrypted, two-tier backups. And stay tuned, because a solution for your smartphone is on the way too.