Have you ever cried over a “dead” hard drive? I nearly did last week when the data partition of my laptop suddenly no longer appeared. It took me a few very nervous hours to fix it, especially when I realised that I did not have a recent backup…
In a survey conducted by Backblaze, 54% of people said they either knew someone, or had themselves recently lost data. And everyone has heard of ransomware attacks where they encrypt your files (making them inaccessible) and demand a ransom payment (usually in untraceable cryptocurrency) to decrypt them. Ransomware attacks are typically carried out using a Trojan file that the user is tricked into downloading or opening when it arrives as an email attachment.
All this got me thinking about backing up my data and it seems that the most recommended back-up strategy is the 3-2-1 method!
A 3-2-1 strategy consists of having at least 3 copies of your precious data: “two” of them local but on different media and at least “one” copy off-site.
Having “two” local data versions, your main one and an onsite back-up, is useful if your laptop hard drive crashes. You will then have a copy on an external hard drive readily available to get the majority of the data back or to use on another computer to continue operation. If you keep this copy up to date, then the data loss will be fairly minimal, as you will only have lost the files that were on your laptop but that you had not yet copied onto the external backup drive.
I personally use a mirrored hard disk strategy where all the data is simultaneously written to two “mirrored” hard drives. The second one stores an exact copy of the data from the first one in real time. This way, if one dies through hardware failure, then the other one is always there.
This may sound perfect, but it is not. This is where the “one” of the 3-2-1 strategy comes in. If your house catches fire, then both your data sources will be gone. Even if you are not as pessimistic, burglars often take laptops and removable hard drives (as they are easy to resell) and this would again leave you high and dry. Therefore, it is essential to always have another copy of your precious data in a different physical location.
This “off-site” backup can take the form of another removable hard drive stored at work or at your parents. Alternatively, it can be a remote backup on a server in the cloud. As the coronavirus lockdown as shown, getting to a second “offsite” physical copy of your data may not always be as easy as a quick drive away, so I have chosen a remote internet connected NAS as my off-site solution.
I hope this post serves as a reminder for you to think about your back-up strategy, but the important point to make is that any strategy is only as good as its implementation. Forgetting to update your backups for over a year will not help!
Establish a frequent back up schedule, based on your assessment of how much data you are willing to lose. It also depends on how often you generate updated data… Nightly backups in an office environment are the norm, but maybe only monthly is quite sufficient at home. Automatic scheduled backups are the best because you don’t have to remember to do them!
There are plenty of free and paid software around. Some keep multiple versions until you run out of a predetermined storage space. Some only update the changes so that they don’t take as long to perform. I personally use and like Allwaysync (https://allwaysync.com/). But make sure you start adopting good regular backup habits from now on.
PS: By the way, a big thanks to EaseUS (https://www.easeus.com/) for their great customer service on their Partition Magic Pro software that I used successfully to recover my missing HD partition.