Worth Reading – If your external drive is always plugged in, it isn’t a backup
Backups are complicated. There are a lot of folks who think they have solid backups of their important files, photos, videos, etc. Many of them are wrong. This article points out one area where people think they have solid backups – they have an external drive plugged in to their PC all the time, syncing a copy of the data from the internal drive.
Both copies of your data plugged into the same device, in the same physical location, do not constitute a solid backup plan.
One, if the PC gets hit with ransomware, it’ll likely also get anything plugged into the device. That would be both copies of your data.
As someone who lives in an area with a hurricane season, I’m also keenly aware that every storage device in my house could get flooded.
So, I have both cloud and physical backups. BUT, even that isn’t foolproof if my cloud backup is also auto-syncing to/from my laptop. That ransomware will connect to that account and erase my cloud backups just as quickly as my always-connected external drive.
So, what do I have for my important stuff, especially all of my photos?
It’s multi-layered.
- I use Dropbox as my cloud storage.
- I have two external drives
- I also have an M365 tenant
Here’s the strategy:
- I do allow Dropbox to auto-sync with my computers – but only the most recent files. This is mostly a disk space issue.
- I own an M365 tenant for my LLC that is not syncing anywhere. It is 100% cloud-based.
- I have one PC where it autosyncs to an external drive that is not plugged in regularly. (About once a week, I plug it in to sync or grab some files I need to work on, and then unplug it again.) This drive also travels with me when I’m out of town.
- My main MacBook autosyncs with Dropbox for easy file storage and retrieval. This is where I work with my personal data.
- I plug the second external drive in once a month or quarter, depending on how often I’ve been out shooting new photos, and back up everything from my Dropbox account.
If there is a natural disaster and all the hardware I have at home is destroyed, I have my Dropbox files.
If one of my computers gets infected, I have offline local backups to restore everything.
If I am somewhere where it is impossible to access my local backups, I have the documents I need available in my M365 tenant that I know would be needed immediately. This may not be necessary for everyone, and it is not cheap, but I have it for the work I do with the M365 newsletter and for consulting; I might as well use some of the storage for emergencies.
For me, it’s a strategy that requires at least three copies of my data:
- Daily use
- Offline
- Cloud – (Or at least a different physical location.)
Having a good backup strategy involves being slightly paranoid. What are the risks? What happens if…? You need to look at the worst-case scenarios and consider if there’s a copy of your important data that would still exist if it happened. It’s not a fun exercise, and if you suffer from anxiety, it can be a bit exhausting to invite that in, but in this case, it could save you from a data disaster.
https://www.howtogeek.com/youre-storing-your-photos-in-the-worst-way-possible/
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