Have you ever lost EVERYTHING you’ve ever saved to your computer? Ever have a backup drive fail on you? Don’t let it happen again by upgrading to a hybrid cloud backup! Protect yourself from the unknown.
It’s happened to everyone at one point or another; system hard drive failure, a bad surge tore through your house and it ended up destroying your electronics, fried flash drives or busted backup media. You’re left with nothing but an empty Documents folder, and months of work and data completely gone. It may seem like no matter how you try to preserve your data, there seems to be a disaster to ruin it all. That’s why you should begin implementing a hybrid cloud backup solution now, eliminating that nervousness associated with storing important data! 
It may seem complicated at first, but it is the best way to making sure you don’t lose those important pictures or company data. To implement a hybrid cloud backup, you need two things: a local backup drive, and a cloud backup service provider. We recommend using an external hard drive as your local backup drive, but a large flash drive or an internal hard drive will work all the same. Be sure to purchase a proper size for the data you plan on backing up! Movies and music take up a LOT more space than a few company files and documents do.
Once you have both key ingredients to your backup, it’s time to set them up. What you want to do is configure all your programs you wish to have backed up to save their backup file on your local backup drive, and copy any data you wish to save to this drive as well. This can be done through the individual programs, or there are some third-party software out there that allow you to set certain files/folders to backup to specific locations at certain times. Once you have your local backup set up thoroughly, it’s time to move to configuring your cloud software. This is usually done through the cloud program itself, in which you want to make it back up your local backup drive. This way, it’s creating a backup of your backup!
Now some may ask “Why do I need to backup something that I’m already backing up?”, and they are rightful in doing so. It may seem repetitive at first, but once you understand why it’s important, you’ll never want to go back to a single backup solution again. I’ll break it down into different groups to help you understand.
1) Business Continuity- Utilizing both forms of backup solutions gives you a flexible solution in case of any downtime. Not only do you have a backup stored on-site of your location on your local backup drive, but you also have a backup that is accessible anywhere! So if your network crashes leaving you disconnected from the internet until your IT department can handle it, you can log into your local backup drive to grab any data you may need. On the other end of things, if you are out on-site and forget to bring that flash drive with all your work materials on it, you can jump into your cloud software and grab anything you needed.
2) Insurance of your Data- You are left with peace of mind that not only is your invaluable data is being stored behind your firewall and network security on your backup drive, but it is being stored on a secured data server that is off-site. So even if one fails, you aren’t left stranded and have the other to rely on.
3) Cost Effectiveness- When you rely solely on local backup drives, you typically end up running out of space before you even realize it. With a cloud backup solution, you can subscribe to a vendor that offers unlimited backup sizes, preventing you from ever needing to buy another drive due to it being full. Simply keep the latest versions of your backups on your local backup drive, and allow the cloud to store all the archives (as well as the current!).
Now that you understand the importance of implementing a hybrid cloud backup solution, head out to your local computer repair shop to purchase a backup drive and ask about suggested cloud backup providers!