The three laws of smart PC backups

March 31 is officially World Backup Day. Declared so by the, uh, official World Backup Day Proclaimers...or something. Anyway, even if it is a made up day it's an excellent reminder to refresh your backup strategy or finally adopt one.

Backups are a critical part of anyone's digital life. The key is not to make it too complicated. Here are three laws—they're more like guidelines—to constructing asolid backup strategy.

Law 1: Back up regularly

Backups aren't much use if you aren't doing them on a regular basis. How often you should backup depends on your personal situation. Some people only bother with backups on a weekly or monthly basis, while anyone who's creating new files on a daily basis will want to back up hourly or at the end of each day, depending on how mission critical your files are.

If you're not interested in a cloud backup service, another alternative is to rotate backup hard drives at home and a remote location like the office. If you opt for this method, make sure your hard drives are encrypted since you wouldn't want a co-worker gaining access to your personal files.

Law 3: Automate what you can

Finally, try to automate every part of the backup strategy that you can. The more invisible your backups are, the better, since you've got more important things to do than worry about the state of your files.

Cloud services take care of automation for your offsite backup, and many local backup programs have a similar feature or a scheduler to decide what time of day to run the local backup. Just remember to have your hard drive plugged in when it's go time—a calendar reminder can take care of that for you.

Follow these three rules and you'll be well on your way to peace of mind and a solid backup strategy.

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