While spring is not quite in the air, it’s now less than two months away, and it’s the perfect time to think about spring cleaning, decluttering and, yes, making a plan to properly back up important computer files. It’s probably not at the top of your to-do list, but it really should be. World Backup Day is March 31st.
Even the savviest computer folks have let data backup fall by the wayside, and no one is immune to its ill effects. So, before your irreplaceable photos and videos or important professional and financial documents can’t be called back from the brink of erasure, mark this as an ASAP to-do. Once you make a plan, you can even automate a good portion of the backup process and quite literally set it and forget it. Plus, World Backup Day is approaching—March 31—and it’s the perfect excuse to put this plan in motion.
Computer experts tout the 3-2-1 rule with built-in redundancy when it comes to putting a proper backup in place. This entails three copies of your files and data, with two on local devices and one at an off-site location. This translates to 1) housing original files and data on your computer; 2) having an on-hand backup on an external hard drive; and 3) then keeping an accessible copy on a cloud backup service. Alternatively, the third copy of your data could be kept on a second external hard drive at a nearby location, such as the office or a friend or family member’s home. The 3-2-1 system helps cover your bases when the unexpected occurs, whether system malfunction, theft, fire, or natural disaster occurs.
Step 1: Take Stock of Backup Needs
- Assess how many laptops or computers in your home require backup.
- Identify important files for back-ups, such as photos, videos, and other personal files. More savvy users may also choose to back up their operating system, programs, drivers, etc., while they’re at it. However, this isn’t necessary, as operating systems and other such components can be reinstalled with little heartache if needed.
- Get a sense of how much space you’ll need to back up your files.
Step 2: Purchase Backup Devices
If you fall into the “average” or “normal” computer user category, chances are you can simply follow the below guidelines for what to purchase for your backup. If you have multiple computers in your home or higher-than-average file storage needs, then you will need to make different and/or additional purchases.
- USB External Desktop Hard Drive: You will need one or two of these, depending on the choices you made above. Western Digital WD My Book (4 TB), Western Digital My Passport Ultra, and LACIE Rugged USB-C continue to rank at the top of best hard drive lists and are priced in the $80 to $120 range depending on size and seller. If you have multiple computers to back up, a network-attached storage device (NAS) can handle that level of data so that it’s housed in one place. The Western Digital 6TB My Cloud Home Personal Cloud and Synology DiskStation DS220+ are highly rated and reasonably priced.
- Cloud Backup Service: Purchase an annual plan with fees in the range of $60 to $70 a year. The online backup service will store your encrypted data on its servers and enable you to retrieve your files when needed. For novices and/or to back up one computer, try Backblaze; for more than one device, take a look at IDrive or OneBackup.
Step 3: Set Up Backups
Now that you’ve assessed your data backup needs and made the necessary technology purchases, it’s time to run initial backups on both the external hard drive and cloud backup service.
To back up files and data to an external hard drive, here’s where you’ll put built-in backup features to use on your Windows PC (File History or Windows Backup) or Mac (Time Machine). Once you run the initial backup, set a calendar reminder to perform incremental backups (only files that have been updated since the last backup) on a schedule that fits your needs. For example, this might be daily, weekly or monthly. To perform the incremental backup, simply connect the external hard drive to your computer and run the built-in backup software. Alternatively, you could keep the external hard drive connected to your computer, and it will perform automatic backups of updated files.
To save your data to the cloud backup service, you’ll first create an account and download software to your computer. You can choose to back up everything (or just about everything) on your computer or indicate which files you’d like to save. The operating system, programs or extremely large files are ones you will likely choose to forego. The online backup service will give you the option to schedule automatic backups.
Three easy steps to Peace of Mind
Taking a few steps to back up your computer is not rocket science. Heck, it’s not even computer science! But three, fairly painless steps, a Saturday afternoon, and a couple of hundred dollars could save you a lot of angst and expense, should your files meet an urtimely and unforeseen disaster. Good thing computers can’t get COVID-19.
Conclusion: I’m good for one thing – being a horrible example
As a content producer, I create a lot of data. How I stored that data was two large hard drives in a raid configuration. I thought, how could both drives fail at once?
I had a few individual drives fail, I replaced them and was on my way. IT gave me a false sense of security, hardening my heart to other forms of data redundancy in the process.
One day about two months ago now, my power supply seemed to act weird. I was checking the cables and heard a tiny little electronic pop sound. You know the one.
I lost all my HDDs, not just my work raid drives, but my personal ones too. Four drives in total!
Ultimately, I had to pay a data recovery company that had a clean room to swap platters into donor drives to recover the data! Cost over $2500. But this recovery included all the pictures of my son growing up these past seven years. So, it was worth it to me to go with “the pros.” But… it taught me a valuable lesson about data redundancy. 3-2-1 all the way.
If you’re curious about my data setup, here is my plan NOW:
- Still using 2x HDD in Raid 1 for work-related files (12TB HDDs)
- Still using 2x HDD in Raid 1 for all personal and important files (8TB HDDs)
- Added Backblaze plan with unlimited storage
- Added Several external USB HDDs for periodic backups
- Added NAS with Raid 1 drives for periodic backup
- Added Google drive for some important files
- Plan to add one more off-site option… but what shall it be? Hmmm
More info:
NY Times: How to Back Up Your Computer
How-To Geek: What’s the Best Way to Back Up My Computer?