Backing up data on Tuesday is World Backup Day, a fixed holiday that encourages people to sell more products such as hard drives and USB thumb drives.

In other words, when was the last time you actually backed up your phone? Or a computer? If you lose your device or steal it, all those precious photos sitting on the phone but not backed up may end up as distant memories.

Also, posting your pictures on Facebook does not count as a backup. After uploading, the social network greatly reduces the resolution, making it unsuitable as a second copy.

Now we are all at home. Why not take a few minutes to back up our media this weekend.

You have multiple options, and it's not just about buying a new hard drive. There are online tools: Your Amazon Prime subscription will back up your photos for you and add devices for your iPhone backup that are much cheaper than an annual iCloud subscription.

Let's calculate the way

First, find out what needs to be backed up. For most people, it's photos and videos, then documents. So if you start with a computer, look at what's on your hard drive.

Most will have specific folders with the appropriate categories: documents, music, movies, pictures, etc. If your data is not in these areas, note their location so you can grab them and back them up.

Phone users will want to get photos, text and email.

Apple offers two ways to back up your phone. You can pay for iCloud storage (see more below), or you can connect your phone to your computer in Settings. You will also need to leave space on your computer hard drive to complete this process.

Many Samsung Galaxy phones have slots for external storage, so the need for backup will not be so urgent. All you need is an accessory micro-SD card. Samsung does provide answers to Apple's iCloud, Samsung Cloud, which has 200 GB of storage and costs $ 2.99 per month.

This is the easiest way to back up online because you don't have to buy extra hardware. You will need to remember to take some time to update the folders and upload them. Some companies have automatic backup solutions (Google's Backup & Sync), but they may cause you more pain and headaches. Since all programs sell backups based on a limited amount of storage, if your automatic backups exceed the allocated amount, you will start getting nag messages to delete.

Get photos from Amazon and Google for online backup in two great and extremely cost-effective ways. If you are a member of the Amazon Prime program, which is designed to facilitate shipping and entertainment, you have access to Amazon's unlimited photo backups. Download the smartphone app and set it to "Auto Save" and Amazon will automatically upload every image you take, but not the video. The benefit of this service is that if you have a Fire TV streaming stick or Echo Show speakers connected, you can instruct the app to display a specific collection of photos as a screen saver.

Google provides the same service for the Nest Hub display unit through Google Photos. The Google Photos website and apps provide free backups of photos and videos, but there are many issues. Their resolution is slightly lower. If you want to get the full resolution, you need to upgrade your Google One plan.

The phone's portable drive, Qubii, starts at $ 39.99 and can be clipped to an iPhone charger to back up photos and videos in the background to a micro-SD memory card. This card will cost extra, but you can buy a 128 GB card for around $ 20, while a 256 GB card costs $ 30. Apple iPhones don't have the same amount of expandable memory as many Android phones, so buying a phone with more storage space is expensive. For example, the iPhone 11 with 64 GB of storage starts at $ 699, the iPhone 11 with 128 GB of storage starts at $ 749, and the iPhone 11 with 256 GB of storage starts at $ 849, so the card is a More economical choice.

SanDisk's iXpand is a portable flash drive that connects to the iPhone's Lightning charging slot and has 128 GB of storage. It sells for just over $ 45.

Hard Drives, the best vintage hard drives are a popular addition on most of our desks. This is the most economical method and usually works faster, but it has some problems. Hard disk failure. At some point, a crash will occur.

Many people like to back up two drives at the same time to take extra steps, and nowadays, as drive prices increase, this is not a bad thing. For years, I've been lucky with the orange LaCie "Rugged" series of portable drives. You can buy a 4 TB model for as little as $ 149 or spend $ 229 on a 1 TB SSD version.

The advantage of an SSD is that it is solid and has no moving parts, making it less prone to failure.

However, by comparison, buying two 4 TB models for $ 300 compared to just $ 100 for 2 TB of backup space per year. Hard drives are a better choice. However, the benefit of online is that you can extract data from anywhere.

And if your home is burned or other disaster, hard drives will follow. This is not the case for online backups.

It is important to sit and do it. Have fun this weekend!

News Reference: https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2020/03/28/weekend-project-backup-data-and-easily-save-photos/2926826001/