The hot topic of last week was the hacking of Mat Honan’s iCloud account and the subsequent loss of over a year’s photographs and records. As Honan admits, he didn’t have a full backup.
As we move more of our stuff to the cloud, there is a natural tendency to rely on it and to feel that a rigid local backup routine is unnecessary. I am constantly amazed by the number of contacts who never backup their data. Years of photographs and records are entrusted to one internal disk in one easily stolen laptop. Some, the Mac users, rely entirely on Time Machine. Very few have a system for local and off-site storage.
In this article on backup strategies, Shawn Blanc emphasises the importance of not leaving anything to chance. It’s an informative read. These days, as he says, back up media is cheap. It is easy to buy and set up a small external disk and, with the right software, everything is taken care of automatically.