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Data loss can happen to anyone at any time, for a multitude of reasons. World Backup Day serves as a good yearly reminder to review how you currently back up your data and take steps to protect yourself from data loss as best as you can.

Causes of data loss

When discussing backups, it is good to understand first how data can be lost. Recent statistics¹ show that physical damage accounts for 47% of data loss cases. This usually involves accidental damage sustained outside of normal hard drive operating conditions, such as knocks, drops or liquid damage. It also includes damage from natural disasters such as fires and floods.

25% of cases can be attributed to human error, which includes scenarios such as accidentally deleted data or formatted devices, and 21% of cases are from ransomware attacks or viruses, which have become even more prevalent in recent years. The remaining 7% of data loss cases seen around the world are due to software malfunctions, which can lead to corrupt or inaccessible data.

With so many ways that data can be lost, especially with the rise of ransomware attacks and accidents due to working from home, it is important now more than ever to make sure that you have an appropriate backup strategy in place.

Tips for backing up your data

Here are five recommendations to help you create better backups and protect your data from permanent data loss.

Back up regularly

It is easy to forget about backing up, however setting up automatic backups can be a useful way of ensuring that your data is protected on an ongoing basis. A daily, weekly or monthly schedule could be used depending on your requirements.

Test your backups

Simply making a backup of your data is not enough. Backups should also be examined at regular intervals to ensure that they are still operational and that your data is still accessible.

Use multiple devices

Data should be backed up to different storage media types at once. In addition, maintaining an off-site backup that is kept disconnected from your computer can further protect against permanent data loss.

Choose how to back up

It is good practice to make a full backup of your devices on a regular basis. This should then be supported by frequent incremental backups to ensure that your backups are always kept up to date.

Know who to call

Even with the best backups in place, accidents can still happen. If your data is lost or inaccessible, you can always contact a professional to help you get it back. Toshiba HDD customers can choose an authorized data recovery service provider such as Ontrack so that your product warranty remains intact.

¹ Source: Data loss cases seen by Ontrack from 18 data recovery labs around the world. (www.ontrack.com)