Thoughts From a Clicker
By Tiny Ruisch
It is almost March 31. World Backup day is a commemorative date celebrated annually by the backup industry and tech industry all over the world. The World Backup Day highlights the importance of protecting data and keeping systems and computers secure. It all started with a post on Reddit when a user wrote about losing their hard drive and wishing someone had reminded them about how important it is to backup data.
Even though you might not think so, backups are important. Its not a question of “if” but “when” your hard drive will fail. Phones get lost. Ransomware gets on computers. Files get accidentally deleted. I knew one person who gave his phone to another family member who promptly deleted all of their photos. If not for the fact that he was unknowingly backing them up to Google Drive, I would not have been able to help him. Accidents happen.
I’m often asked by club members on what is the best way to back their data. The answer is that there isn’t a best way. What works for me won’t work for everyone. The first thing you need to do is determine what to backup. Some people backup everything on their computer. Others are like me and only identify items that are important to them. This may include items like photographs, medical files, personal data, newsletter files and a few other things.
I do believe in using the 3-2-1 backup strategy rule. This simply states that you need three copies of any important data. At least two of the copies should be on different storage media, such as a hard drive, removable drive, cloud storage drive, etc. Finally, one of the copies should be kept off site in case of a disaster.
There are many ways to back up your data. The simple and easy method is to copy and paste. All Operating Systems have this method built-in. There are many file syncing programs that you can use to automatically duplicate your files. Most cloud storage services can be set to automatically backup. Of course, there are hundreds of backup programs you can install to copy files or image your hard drives. Pick one that is easy for you to use. By doing so, you will be more likely to routinely backup.
One final thing to remember, a backup that you can’t restore is no worse than not having a backup. You should test your backup data to make sure it is usable. Unfortunately, this can be dangerous to do. If you are restoring an image backup to test it and something goes wrong, you can destroy the files you backed up. Avoid this by stopping at the very last step before the restore would begin. This will verify that your recovery disk works and the backup program can access what’s necessary to perform the restore.
If you decide not to do any backups, maybe the NSA will be able to give you a copy from their files.
Thanks for reading.