That makes it easy to keep backups “off site” in a garden shed, an office drawer, or at a trusted friend’s house. I still like optical discs because they are cheap, and you can easily make multiple copies.
That should have room for both a conventional, incremental backup and an unencrypted, uncompressed copy of your folder of important files. For example, you can buy a 3TB drive for around £100. Facebook uses vast numbers of Blu-ray discs for backups.ĮHDs can hold 8TB nowadays, though smaller EHDs are more affordable. You can get 50GB (single-layer) or 100GB (dual-layer) on a Blu-ray disc. If you only have 700MB, it will fit on a CD-Rom. Ideally, your vital data should fit on a convenient storage format. Photograph: Chris Clor/Getty Images/Blend Images RM The idea is to assemble a relatively small set of important files that you can back up quickly while avoiding the rubbish.ĭon’t rely on a single cloud service for backup purposes, and be wary of relying on two. (This also helps protect them from other users.) However, you can create your own separate hierarchy with the subfolders you need – photos, work, taxes, medical records etc.
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Windows tries to help by creating special folders for documents, downloads, music, pictures and videos. You can enhance your backup strategy by keeping vital files together in one folder that you can back up without having to back up your whole PC. You may be able to re-download music files, for example, or just reinstall an operating system or application. Many other files are easy to replace, probably without charge. Some are irreplaceable, such as family photos, and some would be hard to replace, such as your half-finished PhD thesis/blockbuster novel or a decade’s accounting data. Smart ransomware also encrypts any files it finds on EHDs and in cloud drives. I do that manually using FreeFileSync so I can scroll through the list of files to be copied and deleted, looking for the unexpected.Īnother reason is the threat of ransomware, which encrypts files on PCs and holds them hostage. That is one reason why I have a second EHD to back up my backup. But if I accidentally delete a file or folder on my PC, the sync program will delete it on the EHD as well. For example, I set up an external hard drive (EHD) that syncs with the data on my PC’s hard drive. People also get caught out by local file synchronisation. Briefly, you have a file, but you can’t access it because the account that created has been closed. This is about the way file ownership works in the Google Apps suite. There’s an even scarier story on Reddit: How we lost over €6,000 by not understanding Google Drive. (Uploading files manually via web interfaces works as you’d expect.) If they went online, of course, the files weren’t there.
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Someone would install Google Drive on a PC, drop some files in its folder, see them upload, then delete the files. When Google told him he was running out of Google Drive space, he went online and emptied the trash folder … which promptly deleted his files. He’d moved his “files” out of the Google Drive folder on his PC, not realising that they were only links. If you delete a file on your local device, does that delete the same file in the cloud? (Which folders are synchronised and which ones aren’t?) Further, are the files on your device really files or are they placeholders – merely links to a file that is actually somewhere else?Ī few years ago, Ovi Demetrian provoked a lot of discussion when he posted a website, Google Drive Sucks: “I lost years of work and personal memories that I saved as Google Docs files because of a poor user interface,” he wrote. That syncing feelingīut you must understand how the synchronisation works.
Today, I’d add a corollary: backups don’t really exist unless you have at least three on different media in different places, and deleting one must not affect any of the others. You may have come across Schofield’s Second Law of Computing, which states that data doesn’t really exist unless you have at least two copies of it.
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