September 20 is Back Up Your Data Day, a day for doing a backup that you don't normally do.
For example:
If you don't normally back up anything at all, then back up your most important files.
Burn them onto a CD, or email them to your Gmail account, or copy them to an external hard drive or to a backup folder on another computer in your house. You could copy them to a thumb drive, but note that thumb drives are easily lost, so be careful. With any of these options, if the files are highly confidential, then you might want to encrypt them first, in any of various ways.
One backup method to avoid: best not to just make a copy on the same computer as the original. Not only does that not protect you from a hard drive crash, but it may cause problems if you accidentally edit the backups instead of the originals.
It’s also a good idea to back up your settings files.
For example, if you use Microsoft Word, back up your Normal.dotm file. That file contains customizations like keyboard shortcuts; if something goes wrong with it, it can take a lot of work to reconstruct.
- If you're confident that your most important files are safe, then take some time today to back up the rest of your data.
Anything you'd be unhappy to lose, make a copy of it. What about your website? Do you edit files directly on the server? If you make a mistake while editing and you destroy a file, will you be able to restore it from backup? If your website is database-backed (like WordPress), are you backing up the database?
Say you already back up all your files locally. It’s a good idea to also back them up offsite.
Imagine something terrible happens: your house burns down, or an earthquake or tornado or hurricane or flood or fire or mudslide destroys your office building. Will you lose all your data, both backups and originals?
There are online backup services you can use; alternatively, you could papermail a CD to an out-of-state friend; you could get a portable hard drive, copy all your files onto it, and put that in a safe deposit box; there are various other options.
Do you keep all of your data in your Google Account? (Gmail, Docs, photos, videos, etc.) If so, then use Google Takeout to download a backup copy of all of your data.
Most of the time, Google will do a great job of keeping track of your data for you. But once in a while, Google suddenly locks people out of their accounts permanently, with no recourse and no way to retrieve their data. So it’s a good idea to have a copy of your data outside of Google.
- You already do all of that stuff? Great! Do you have an automated system (or as automated as possible) to run backups regularly? If not, consider implementing one. If that's not feasible, then do one of your non-automated backups today.
Another related thing to consider: documenting various things about your physical possessions. Or to put that another way: back up metadata.
For example, if you have a lot of books, consider cataloguing them, so that if something catastrophic happens, you’ll have a record of them. (And then back up that catalog.)
Notes
In 2009, I arbitrarily chose September 20 to be Back Up Your Data Day.
Many years later, I learned that other people had chosen March 31 to be World Backup Day, and they had done much more to spread the word. And their name is catchier.
I thought about giving up on Back Up Your Data Day, but then decided that having two backup days about six months apart was a reasonable idea, so I continue to post about Back Up Your Data Day each September.
In 2024, I decided to make this writeup a separate page rather than just a blog post, so that I can update it over time.