Why Should I Back-Up My Data?
Backing-up your personal or work critical data should be part of your routine computer maintenance. With the proliferation of cloud storage options, backing-up your data is easier than ever. Having secure back-ups of your data protects you and your data from hard drive failures, data corruption, and allows you to access your data while you are away from your work computer.
How Often Should I Back-up?
This all really depends on how much of your data you would like to back-up at one time. Here are a few tips to keep in mind when setting back-up schedules.
- Most back-up systems offer Full and Incremental back-ups.
- Performing a Full back-up takes a lot of time, but if you have to completely reinstall your operating system, this provides the easiest route to reloading the data on to your computer.
- Performing Incremental back-ups are fast, but if you rely on them and need to recover your entire file structure, you will need to recover using your last Full back-up and all the intervening Incremental back-ups.
- You may not know immediately whether your files have been broken. Keeping a couple of months of back-ups will allow you to recover data that may have been damaged weeks ago.
What Files Should I be Backing-Up?
This will vary depending on the user. It is recommend that you back-up anything that cannot be easily restored if you were to lose the contents of your hard drive. OIT suggest that you regularly back-up the following files.
- Contents of your Documents folder or wherever you save your work. For many, this might be the Desktop or even a Temporary
- Music purchased digitally.
- Photographs/Videos
- Emails, address books, web browser bookmarks
On computers owned by the University, users are solely responsible for backing-up and restoring data for any non-University business or personal files. OIT at the University are under no obligation to back up or restore personal data or applications.
What options are available to me?
OIT offers a number of ways to back-up the data on your office machine. These options are only available while you are employed with the University. Once you are no longer affiliated with the University, you will not have access to these systems.
- All employees of the University are given space on our network storage system. (STORAGE)
- All employees of the University are granted access to NevadaBox. (box.unr.edu)
- All employees of the University are granted access to OneDrive through Office365 (portal.office.com)
If you would like to use external media (flash drives or external hard drives) please follow the following instructions:
Microsoft Operating System
Apple OSX
Best Practices for Data Back-Up
- Consider encrypting back-ups if containing University data.
- Keep extra back-ups off-campus in a secure location.
- Verify that your back-ups are current and active.
- Wipe or destroy any physical back-ups (flash drive or external hard drive) before discarding them.
- Keep University data off of physical external devices.