Avoid Losing Money to Data Loss, Tools to Back up Your Video Content

According to a survey by Kroll Ontrack, only 33 percent of companies recover 100 percent of lost data, and 67 percent were unable to restore most of their data. Scary statistic.

Another 21 percent reported their backup was not operating correctly. Losing your marketing materials, business assets and time can cost you a bundle. Fortunately, performing a data backup doesn’t have to be a complicated or time-consuming process.

Here are some tools and tips for backing up your videos and other assets:

Amazon Cloud

If you are an Amazon Prime member, you already enjoy free unlimited photo storage for images uploaded via your smartphone, computer and other devices. For a more robust option, upgrade to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to store items in different buckets, including videos, photos and documents. You can control who has access to the bucket and what they can do in it, such as creating, deleting and retrieving your materials.

Receive updates from Amazon when team members upload a video and restore earlier versions as needed.

Mozy

Take your storage needs a step further and back up your entire computer. Services like Mozy's Enterprise package can automatically back up your system multiple times a day without much effort. The setup takes a few minutes and then users can forget about it and move onto other things while Mozy automatically saves everything you’re doing.

If you suffer from a data crash, you can quickly retrieve your important marketing materials and videos. Restore a few files for an important meeting or your entire computer to get back up and running quickly.

Time Machine

Most computers come with their own backup system, such as Apple's Time Machine. If you use a Mac with OS X, you can set up Time Machine and select a backup destination. Time Machine keeps hourly, daily and weekly backups and deletes old ones once the backup drive is full.

Unlike cloud-based storage and backup, you need an external drive connected to your Mac or you need to specify another backup method. The first backup takes some time, but the others are automatic, eliminating the need to leave yourself reminders to do it on your own.

Dropbox

Another last contender is using a true cloud service to store your video files and content. Free services are available such as Google Drive, and as well as as our favourite, Dropbox. In addition to being free to start, with Dropbox you can store your files in a specific folder on your main computer and each file will automatically be backed up to the cloud nearly instantaneously.

In addition to being used to backup files remotely and on the fly, Dropbox data can be accessed from any other computer or device you choose – and each will contain the most-up-to-date version of any file! This means you can edit a video file and export it to your Dropbox folder, walk over to your tablet, and view this same video moments later!

Backup Plan

Remember, it’s not enough to simply sign up for a backup service and forget about it. Check to ensure backups are happening, and do a test to see if you can restore your files. For especially sensitive videos or other data, create a backup plan for your automatic backup. You can throw a few files on a USB stick, use two different backup methods or ask a team member to backup all video and shared files on their computer as well.

The trade off to spending a little time on your backups is small in comparison to losing your videos and other valuable data. Backups generally don’t cost much, and, once they are set up, take little to no time to maintain.

Make backing up a regular part of your business operations to save yourself time and money in the long run.