Many of us, Lucy included, used to think that ‘backing up’ meant saving important files to a hard drive or Dropbox at the end of the work day.

People like Johnny will tell us that this is a copy, not a backup, and we should not rely on it.

You might think that you have a backup because you store your data in the cloud. But if you mess up a file and don’t realise for a week, that isn’t going to help.

You can’t ‘roll back’ to a version of that file from a week ago like you can with a backup. Some cloud services do offer restoring features, but they are not backups.

A backup service is dedicated software that:

• automatically keeps historical versions of your data,
• at a schedule you define,
• that is easy to recover.

The magic of a backup means that you can step back in time and recover whatever version of a file you need. And you don’t have to think about it – it happens constantly in the background.

Whereas a copy ‘saved as’ to a hard drive is singular, it happened at a particular time point. This might not be so useful when your computer crashes before you hit save. It also relies on you remembering to do it.

Whether you conduct all, or most, of your business in the digital world, organising a trustworthy backup service is worth every penny.