Ideally, how often should you back up the data on your computer? once an hour once a day once a month once a year

It depends of several issues. All of them can apply.

Explanation:

   The goal of setting up a backup procedure, corporate or residential, is to have one or more backups outside the main system, be it just a mobile phone or a professional storage system for disaster recovery.

    In order to define the creation of an efficient backup routine in your projects, you must first perform a survey to verify which guidelines should be used in the process. Key information that should be raised include:

Amount of Data

  All daily interactions of a project generate data. You must know the number of information contained that should be part of the backup. Of course there is the possibility to perform more than one backup, ie create multiple processes for different data sources.

Data Sensitivity

    The backup creation time is directly linked to the amount of information that should be part of it, so the interesting thing is to split the data and create more than one backup routine.

    Sensitive information tends to require more backups as it can change rapidly (several times a day). Thus, its periodicity should be higher.

   For example, for the general business base, you might want to set up a backup every day at the end of business. For sensitive data, it is necessary to increase this periodicity, making copies two, three or more times a day depending on changes in the database.