Back Up Your Work Like a Pro: A Cybersecurity Essential for Content Creators

Your work is your world. Whether it's high-res cosplay photos, editing project files, music tracks, stream layouts, scripts, or client work—you’ve likely spent hours (if not weeks) crafting it.

Now imagine losing it all. No warning. No recovery. Just... gone.

It’s a nightmare that hits creators more often than you think. From stolen laptops to corrupted drives, accidental deletes to ransomware attacks—data loss is real. But the good news? With the right backup strategy, it's also totally avoidable.

Here’s how it breaks down:

Primary Copy – The one you’re working on right now

This lives on your phone, computer, SD card, or tablet.

Secondary Copy – A backup on an external hard drive

Use a portable SSD or HDD to make manual or automatic backups. Bonus if it’s encrypted.

Off-Site Copy – A secure cloud backup

This protects you if your gear gets lost, stolen, or damaged (fire, flood, or worse). Cloud backups are your safety net. Tools like Google Drive are good, but a dedicated cloud backup provider is even better.

NAS Devices:

These are similar to external drives, except the connect to the network, instead of your computer or phone directly.

These are great as permanent forms for storage, and great for long term backups. They are generally more reliable than an external drive, and more suitable if you rarely need to move it.

A NAS has a higher upfront cost, but they also have a lot of other useful features and benefits such as disk health monitoring, external backups and remote file access from multiple machines.

(Budget under £500) Synology NAS DiskStation DS124 + Seagate IronWolf NAS Hard Drive
(Budget over £500) Synology NAS DiskStation DS223 +2 x Seagate IronWolf Pro NAS Hard Drive

There are many other brands of NAS, however security is VERY important for a NAS devices and Synology have a long established reputation in the small business and IT industry, it is worth paying a little bit extra for!

Cloud Storage:

Cloud storage is typically more expensive than both external drives and NAS devices in the long term, however it is generally considered the safest offsite method and requires less maintenance. Just remember to test the backups occasionally (like any other method).

Backblaze – Unlimited backup, great for lots of photos and video.
iCloud/ Google Drive / OneDrive / Dropbox – Good for everyday files
iDrive – Affordable, with mobile backup support
Acronis True Image Advanced/Premium - More comprehensive cloud backup solution

Make sure to encrypt your backups if they contain sensitive client data or private content.

🚫 Don't rely on just one backup (especially if it’s always plugged in—ransomware loves that).
🚫 Don't use only cloud sync (like Google Drive) as a backup – accidental deletes still sync and vanish.
🚫 Don't forget to test your backups – make sure you can restore from them before you need to. Just because a backup job reports as successful, does not mean it actually backed up all your data.
🚫 Don't store backups in the same room as your gear – if your house burns down or gets burgled, so does your data.
🚫 Don't use SSDs for long term archive storage - Apart from being more expensive than HDDs, they aren't designed to store data reliably when unplugged for several months or years.

FULL BACKUP
Backs up a fresh copy of EVERYTHING, EVERYTIME.
For example
Mon - 12345 (FULL)
Tues - 123456 (FULL)
Wed - 1234567 ((FULL)
Thu - 12345678 (FULL)
DIFFERENTIAL
Backs up any changes since the last FULL backup
For example
Mon - 12345 (FULL)
Tue - 6 (Differential)
Wed - 67 (Differential)
Thu - 678 (Differential)
INCREMENTAL
Backs up any changes since the last backup, regardless of what type it was (Full, Differential or Incremental)
For example
Mon - 12345 (FULL)
Tue - 6 (Incremental)
Wed - 7 (Incremental)
Thu - 8 (Incremental)

Backup software solutions will use a flavour of differential and incremental backups to run more frequently, whilst minimising the storage required for retaining daily, weekly or monthly backups.

Each backup type consumes a different amount of storage.

For example, for 100GB of files:

100GB = Size of 1 full backup
10Gb = Approx size of 1 incremental backup
1GB = Approx size of 1 differential backup.

The exact size of incremental and differential backups will vary, it depends on how many changes you have made.

The most recent backup can be retrieved using a combination of the latest full backup and any differential and incremental backups that have run after that.

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