DO YOU STILL NEED BACKUP IN 2026?

With modern cloud services and solid-state storage, you might think traditional backup methods are obsolete, but Darien Graham-Smith urges you not to risk your data

- Darien Graham-Smith

Technology keeps getting smarter, more reliable and more cloud-based, and old-school backup regimes have fallen by the wayside.

Many of us remember the days of copying key files onto floppy disks at the end of the working day, or periodically burning DVDs and sending them off to remote storage - in accordance with the “3-2-1” rule, which advised us to keep three copies of all data, across two different disks (or other media) and one offsite copy.

Nowadays that rule seems archaic. While external storage media are increasingly rare, remote data centres are an everyday fact of life. And if a file goes missing or gets accidentally corrupted, it’s easy to assume that there will be a copy sitting safely out there on a server somewhere. With such a volume of data now passing through our hands on a daily basis, we may feel it's no big deal anyway if a few files get lost here and there.

But while we may have lost our sense of urgency when it comes to backing up, it’s not something you should forget about. Let’s look at some of the reasons we tell ourselves why we don’t need backups any more - and find out if we're fooling ourselves.

1 Everything's safely stored in the cloud

All right, it’s an exaggeration to say everything is in the cloud, but for most of us the active files that we work on every day are automatically synchronised to Google Drive, OneDrive or whatever your cloud of choice may be. There’s an argument that this model protects your data better than the old overnight backup routine: back then, a crash just before home-time could mean losing a whole day’s work, whereas today’s services use continuous updates to keep the remote copy of your file in lockstep with the one on your hard disk.