Do You Need It?
I talked about setting up a backup plan, but there's another thing to think about; what should you backup? It should be clear that the more you backup, the more you'll pay for your backups. By being selective in what you backup, you'll be able to keep the costs down. I've gone through this myself and came up with a couple simple rules to follow.
Should It Stay Or Should It Go?
- Can you get it back another way?
If you have music you bought from iTunes, you could just redownload it if you lost it. (Maybe. See the comments below.) Depending on the size of your music fetish, this could save you quite a bit of hard drive storage or remote backup costs.
I like to do programming and have quite a bit of source code. There's no need for me to store the actual compiled program, since I can always recreate it later. Do you have files like this?
- Can you just reinstall it?
I don't backup any of my programs and I don't backup my operating system files either. That would be wasting gigabytes of storage space on something that I can just reinstall if need be. Some people like to copy everything so they can get up and running quicker if something happens, but most normal people don't need to do that. Since you usually pay monthly for the amount of data you store on a remote backup, it's a waste of money in the long run.
- Is it worth it?
There may be files that you're not sure you want to backup. You should be able to figure out if it's really worth it. A bunch of text files you'd like to keep? Go ahead and back them up since text files take up such small space. Have some video files that you really don't need anymore but might want later? Keep them on the local backup, but skip the remote backup. Video files cost a lot in remote storage costs, but will be easier to keep locally. The key is figure out the cost of keeping them and then rate that against how important they are to you.
The point here is reducing costs by selectively backing up what you need versus what isn't important. If the cost doesn't matter so much to you, it doesn't hurt to just back everything up. But if you want to watch your costs, choosing what to backup and what not to backup can help you keep the overall costs of your backup plan down.
