Most people have lost access to important data, such as family photos, documents, videos, etc., and it’s never a good feeling when you can’t get it back.
An accident or failure could happen to your laptop, phone, game console, computer, or its data at any time. Some things can be expected, such as a hard drive failure, but other data loss scenarios can be unexpected, like a virus making everything inaccessible or physical damage to the device. Even a dog might damage smaller things like flash drives. Don’t worry, we love dogs! Just keep an eye on them 👀
The best way to avoid the stress from losing data and the costs of data recovery is to organise a backup system. Burlingham IT Services can help you organise one, just get in touch! Or take a look at our pointers here to organise one yourself, but do get in touch if you’re not sure about organising a backup.
What’s a backup?
A backup is an extra copy of your data, which could be of photos and videos, documents, or data saved by an app, which is kept in a separate safe and secure location. This could be on the internet or cloud storage, but it can also be on another computer or a portable hard drive.
Having a backup means that if you lost access to your original data for whatever reason, then you can quickly restore a recent copy from the backup and carry on with little interruption.
If you have an Outlook, Apple, or Google account, you should have some free space to work with for a quick backup of your most important files. Microsoft and Apple provide 5GB and Google provide 15GB for free (at the time of writing in May 2025). You can pay for more online storage as well if you need it. Other providers are available as well, such as Dropbox.
Having any regular backup is good, but we strongly recommend that you follow the 3-2-1 rule, especially for your most important files.
The 3-2-1 rule
Three copies, two of which on different storage mediums, and one of which offsite
Explained a bit further, this means that in addition to whatever data you have on your device, you should keep an extra two copies of it (they don’t need to be three constantly up-to-date copies of the same data, a regular backup will be fine).
A good example for an important Word document would be keeping your working copy on your computer, a second copy on a portable hard drive, and a third copy on OneDrive. This will satisfy the 3-2-1 rule.
On a phone you could back up things such as your photos and WhatsApp messages to iCloud or Google Drive and keep a third copy on your computer as well.
This is the best way to ensure that files and data that’s irreplaceable, like family photos, are safe and secure.
How can I organise a backup
There are many options and providers for making backups on phones and computers. Windows provides its own backup tools through OneDrive and the Settings app, Macs have Time Machine and iCloud available to them, and iPhones and Androids can use iCloud and Google Drive, respectively. Other backup providers are available for all of these, but these are the most well known.
We’ve linked to the setup instructions to each of the providers above to help you get set up. If you get stuck please give us a call and we’ll work with you to get a backup set up.
Other things you can do
Computers can also remember previous versions of your files. If you use the likes of OneDrive or Google Docs for work, you’ll probably be already familiar with this, but computers can do this too for offline files. This is not necessarily the same as a backup but it can come in handy as well.
If you’ve got a backup already, check that it works regularly and that it’s able to restore your files. A backup that you can’t access is as good as no backup at all. We can help you check that your backups are working properly, just let us know!
I’ve already lost data, what can I do?
Make sure that you’ve checked the usual places first, such as the Recycle Bin or the Trash on a computer, or anywhere else your files or data could have ended up.
If you have lost data, please know that we’re not a data recovery service (we do tech support instead) but we can point you in the right direction for a data recovery service. These involve highly trained specialists who will thoroughly inspect your device or its storage drive to see what they can recover.
This process can be costly and there’s no guarantee of a successful recovery, but the data recovery specialists are the best people to consult on this.
