Backing Up Your Data

Whether it’s family photos, professional work or sensitive legal documents, everyone in the modern age has some amount of data that is precious to them. Not everyone is entirely informed on the best ways to preserve that data though. In previous endeavors, I’ve seen people come to tears that their computers drive had failed after storing the last five years of their childrens’ lives on their computers. The fact of the matter is, the materials in these machines are finite and you have to expect them to fail. There isn’t a set time-frame so the sooner you take action, the better off you’ll be.

In this article I’m going to discuss a few different options, considering there really isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution. The option (or options) you decide on will depend entirely on how precious the data is to you, and how much it will cost to maintain the integrity of the data. Also it should be noted that I’m targeting the consumer class here, larger organizations I expect to have much more complex backup solutions.

I’ll start off by mentioning the most common solution – external hard drives. There are a few things to be aware of when choosing to use external hard drives. First, they fail too. Just moving all your data to a drive will not keep it safe if that is the drive that fails. Second, natural disasters – they can be damaged or lost in a fire. A decent solution to this if you want to be completely offline is to purchase two drives, one that you use consistently, and one that you store in a safety deposit box and update maybe twice a month or whatever time-frame you deem reasonable. Obviously you would be subjected to rent on the box, see your local banks.

Another option would be your standard-issue cloud storage provider. I’m not going to go into this one too much because most users are aware of services like Dropbox. However, there are a few things to consider on this, first is your cost, you’ll be paying a subscription to get any reasonable amount of storage. Second is privacy. It’s one thing to nonchalantly recognize that everything you do is being tracked. It’s an entirely different thing to read a person’s first-hand testimonial to the practice. No matter your opinion on the subject – you need to be aware that anything you upload will be visible to someone.

There are a few services that boast privacy such as Tresorit and Sync . You can also opt for a backup software that you designate the file structure such as Spideroak or Sugarsync.

Luckily there is a happy median to these solutions. I personally use a software called Duplicati. This software has been around for quite a while and has a large community of contributors that help to improve it and fix bugs. One reason I recommend this software is it runs on all the major operating systems – it just runs in the background and you open up the interface in your favorite web browser. You can set it to run the backup job on a schedule, and best of all you can encrypt those backups in-transit to many types of cloud storage. And there you have it, cloud + privacy. Win/win. The most important thing here is to store your encryption passphrase in a password manager (you DO use one, don’t you) so that it’s safe because it’s a two-way street – without that passphrase you can’t access that data either.

If you have the technical know-how, you can build out a Nextcloud server (a cloud storage solution that YOU manage) in your own home for a reasonable price, I do this personally, and have Duplicati backing up to a cloud storage I use every six hours. This is more advanced and requires you to have your own hardware, but it’s also the best way to have your cloud be completely private.