Did you go to Glastonbury this year? If you did, you’d know the four basic human needs – food, water, air and shelter – which you have to get sorted before you can start enjoying the music. You’ll also know that there is now a fifth basic human need – data.
Be honest: can you live without your smartphone, tablet, laptop or Fitbit? No? Then your entire life is being recorded; and that means you’re generating huge amounts of data, particularly if you’re enjoying events like Glastonbury – and if you want to enjoy sharing them with friends.
Mobile phone company EE, which provided the world’s biggest temporary 4G network for the Glastonbury festival, says that this year’s audience used an estimated 15 Terabytes of data. That’s 20 times more than five years ago and the same as downloading three million Adele tracks.
Imagine what would happen, though, if you dropped your precious devices in Glastonbury’s famous mud. Or what if someone raided your bag while you were entranced by ColdPlay or your attempts to download a dodgy live version of the act on the other infected you with ransomware?
Your life would be on hold until you sorted your data out.
So how are you going to protect your summer festival memories? The best way is to invest a relatively small sum on a Cloud-based backup and data archiving service.
If you go for Acronis True Image Cloud, costs will start at around £70, the price of a reasonable meal for two in Shoreditch, a cheap return train ticket to Glastonbury or less than a third of a £228 weekend ticket this year.
You may already be using the free storage that you can get from Google, Amazon, Dropbox or the like; but if, like most festival goers, you’re recording every waking moment on your phone, tablet, GoPro or whatever, then you’ll soon exceed the free limits, so it’s worth looking at the relative costs of all the different services on the market.
Another thing you need to take into account is the fact that the free services, and lots of the paid-for ones as well, usually only backup your data files and often only the ones that you’ve specified.
Acronis doesn’t just backup all of your data, it also stores an image of your entire hard drive, operating system, current settings and all. That means if you have a problem, you don’t have to reconfigure your computer and the programs on it before you can start downloading the data. You can be up and running again typically in an hour.
If you’re not a festival goer, you may think you aren’t generating the volume of data that means you need to invest in a reliable and cost-effective Cloud backup service. Think again.
The amount of raw data each and every one of us is creating will rise exponentially over the next few years. According to various predictions, there are going to be anything from 20 billion to 50 billion connected devices by 2020.
With the likes of Google’s Nest, Hive from British Gas and a whole range of other contenders, our central heating, lights and even our cookers, fridges and toasters are already being linked up to the internet.
According to research from 2015, the UK is already one of the most connected countries in the world, with 71% of us having a smartphone, compared to the European average of 61%. Last year, the average UK consumer owned 3.3 connected devices, up 10% from 2014, with 28% using five or more devices. If you work in sectors like the media, IT or finance, chances are you’ll already be off the top of the scale in terms of the number of devices you rely on. And what do those devices rely on? Data.
Jeff Hart, UK Managing Director, Acronis
Originally posted Faraday Tech News 30 August 2016