Paper Doll’s Ultimate Stress-Free Backup Plan
Last Thursday, March 31, 2022, was World Backup Day.
When was the last time you backed up your computer?
THAT SYNCING FEELING
One of three things just happened when you read that question.
- You felt a bit smug and superior because you’ve got automatic backups set for all of your devices, you know how they work, and are confident that everything is working as it should.
- You felt a sinking feeling in your stomach and wanted to reach over and click to literally any other page because you’re pretty sure you’re not backed up anywhere.
- You felt confused. You know some things are “synced” and you are pretty sure some things are backed up, and you know you have copies of your important files, but every time you hear about backing up, you have a vague feeling that you don’t know what you don’t know. (Speaking of which, you may want to read Chron’s Explain the Difference Between Sync & Backup.)
I’m not going to guilt-trip you. I know that you know that you need to back up your data for safekeeping. You know that you need to back up your data, just as you know you need floss your teeth and change your car’s oil. But knowing is not doing, and it’s certainly not doing as often as it should be done.
You know that you need to back up your data, just as you know you need floss your teeth and change your car's oil. But knowing is not doing, and it's certainly not doing as often as it should be done. Click To TweetI get it. If you don’t already have a keen handle on your backup system, just reading this tweet is like sitting there and waiting for the hygienist to fuss at you for not flossing, or flossing properly, or often enough, or like having the mechanic make that face, the one where he knows that you know that he knows you should have brought your car in at least a thousand miles ago.
But stuff goes wrong. There are fires, floods, and tornadoes. There are hard drive crashes and burglaries. There are laptops that get left behind at airport security or in coffee shops. 29% (almost a third) of lost data is due to accidents. (Got a kid or a cat who delights in spilling liquids near your expensive gadgets? Have you ever tripped over the charging cord as you ran to rescue said kid or cat or whomever?)
The truth is, it does us no good to organize our resources (digital, paper, or otherwise) if our things aren’t protected. A solid back-up plan is like an excellent insurance policy.
No, you don’t like paying a monthly premium for health insurance or re-upping your insurance every six months on your car. But I bet if you were really sick and needed expensive medical care, or if you’d just had a car accident, and someone asked you, “Are you glad you bought insurance?” you wouldn’t wave your hand away and categorize it as having been an extravagance.
Backups are 21st-century insurance policies against loss of important information, loss of work (and thus loss of time), and loss of convenience (of having all of your preferences and file hierachies set the way you like them). Today, we’re going to look at some of the essential concepts of backing up so it doesn’t seem like such a frustrating, nebulous topic.
A FEW KEY CONCEPTS
No matter how you back up your computer, there are two concepts that will make all the difference between assured success and the creeping fear of failure:
Embrace the Autopilot
Your life is busy. Maybe you’ve got a career or even a business that you run, or you could be a full-time or part-time student. Perhaps you’ve got kids you’re raising or senior parents you’re helping care for, or possibly both. You’re trying to keep all the balls in the air, so it’s no surprise that computer backup is not first and foremost in your grey matter.
The key to digital security is backing up regularly and frequently. If you only backed up once a week, but create dozens of important documents, or write thousands of words in even a few documents, backing up only occasionally would put your stuff at risk.
Plus, if you use only manual, non-automated backups, then you’d be dependent upon prospective memory (in other words, you’d have to remember to remember) to back up. With everything else going on in your life, are you like to remember to back up?
Maybe you’re thinking, “That’s OK. I’ll set a reminder on my phone. I’ll schedule backups for every Monday at 11 a.m.!”
Great idea, in the abstract. However, although scheduling backups is well intentioned, let’s do a reality check. How often have you set a reminder to drink more water, or get up from the computer and walk, or do any other smart habit, only to find yourself swiping the task away from your screen when you’re engrossed in something else?
And what if your schedule calls you to be away from your computer when you’ve planned to back it up? What if you’re picking up a sick kid at the nurse’s office or in a meeting that has run long?
Using technology to automate the backup process means you can safely set it and (mostly) forget it.
Use the Belt-and-Suspenders Approach
Malware. Ransomeware. Hard drives crashes. Stolen computers. Third-party providers go out of business or eliminate services. There is no single, 100%-secure way to protect your research, spreadsheets, writing, photos or other data from every possible problem.
Usually, when we’re organizing homes or offices, redundancy can lead to clutter. However, when we’re talking about backup, redundancy is essential to secure your data and let you sleep at night.
So, I encourage you to develop a backup plan that involves using multiple strategies simultaneously.
FOUR METHODS OF BACKUP
There are four methods for (very generally) backing up your data.
“Flash” the Peace Sign
Most people wouldn’t start with mentioning this, but if you’re not backing up anything right now, you can give yourself some sense of peace by using a flash drive.
Just copy your most important stuff (like your thesis, your major project for work, the novel you’re writing, vital photos, etc.) onto a flash drive and make sure it travels with you wherever you go.
Why wouldn’t most people advise this method? It fails all of our requirements!
It’s not a system, isn’t automated, doesn’t ensure that you do it regularly and frequently, and on its own, it doesn’t protect against most dangers.
I mean, you could set an alarm on your phone to back up iterations of your most important documents and new photos at the end of each day…but you’ll probably ignore it. And, unless you ensure that your flash drive is almost never (except when backing up) near your computer, it’s less belt-and-suspenders and more like holding-your-pants-up-with-one-hand. It’s better than nothing, but just barely.
Do Some “Hard” Time
Backing up to a local external drive is the first real strategy I want you to consider, and one that is a lot easier than you probably fear. The process is shockingly simple, and I’ll admit that years ago, I’d put off doing automated local backup, too. And then I kicked myself for having put it off for so long once I saw how easy it was to set up. We’re talking minutes. Like during-a-long-commercial-break number of minutes.
Back up your computer to a hard drive using software designed to automate the process, like Apple’s built-in Time Machine.
Although Time Machine is free, you’ll want to purchase an external hard drive that’s bigger than the hard drive inside your computer. So, if your computer has a 1 TB hard drive, you might purchase a 2TB external hard drive.
If you weigh it against the value it provides, tangible data storage is cheap. It also takes up very little space. Previously, I used an Apple AirPort Time Capsule and backed up my computer over Wi-Fi, so the external hard drive didn’t even live in the same room as my computer. Now, I have a 2 TB Western Digital My Passport for Mac External Hard Drive that’s about the size of a deck of cards, and at 4.22″ x 2.95″, it’s smaller than an index card! It’s plugged into the back of my computer, sits right behind it out of the way, and I can completely ignore it except to dust it.
Once you have acquired an external hard drive, you connect it to your computer (usually with a USB, USB-C, or Thunderbolt cable) and then open the software. With Time Machine, you open Time Machine preferences, either from the menu bar or via System Preferences from the Apple Menu. You’ll be prompted to select a backup disk (the one you just acquired) and then Time Machine will automatically start backing up your computer. No muss, no fuss.
If you’ve got a PC running Windows, the process works in a similar way, but Microsoft doesn’t have an easy-peasy built-in software solution identical to Time Machine. (Windows has a bunch of independent, and sometimes confusingly conflicting, solutions.)
That means, on the one hand, you have more backup software choices. On the other hand, more backup choices makes it more likely you’ll put off acquiring and installing the software. To make it a little easier, I suggest you look at the following articles written by people on the Windows side of things, recommending free and paid solutions:
Best Windows Backup Software 2022 (PC World)
The Best Backup Software for Windows 2022 (Tech Advisor)
The Best Backup Software and Services for 2022 (PC Mag)
(Note, some of the above will include software that works with cloud solutions, as well as local hard drives.)
Backing up the data on your computer to a local external hard drive will prevent against computer failure but not against fire or a natural disaster. If your backup is right next to your computer, they’re subject to the same environmental ouchies.
Again, this is why we want to use a belt-and-suspenders approach. If you’re not planning on using a cloud solution (see more, below), then you’ll want to consider having two different external hard drives, and switching them off, perhaps keeping one off-site (at your office, a family member’s home, or in your safe deposit box) so that there’s something up-to-date and off-site at all times.
Send in the Clones
Of the “local” solutions, this is the one that’s the most advanced, but it also yields the most benefits. A clone of your computer literally copies your entire machine/computer, so all of the programs and the data get cloned, or copied, to an identical hard drive. SuperDuper for Mac and EaseUS for PCs are well-known options, or peruse Tech Radar’s Best Disk Cloning Software of 2022 for more ideas.
Cloning a disk makes an exact duplicate of the original source hard drive. It includes the data, but not just the data; it also includes every installed program, any partitions of the hard drive, and any hard drive configurations as well. So, while the other backup methods get you your data, cloning gives you an exact duplicate, more like Dolly the Sheep and less like the bearded, bizarro/evil versions of characters in sci-fi TV shows.
With a clone, your computer’s hard drive and the clone’s hard drive have all the same content in exactly the same disk layout, whereas cloud backup generally backs up data, but not software programs.
Finally, a cloned hard drive with an operating system is going to be bootable, meaning you can use it to start up any replacement computer as if it were the original. You don’t have have to perform a “recovery” as you would from your data on an external local backup or cloud backup.
Enjoy Serenity in the Clouds
A cloud solution is a sort of heavenly automation. With a cloud service, you install a small piece of software on your hard drive of your computer. Once you follow some on-screen instructions for setting up the app or software, the cloud service will make copies of all of your data — first a full backup of all of your data, then for all future efforts, and incremental backup of anything you’ve added or changed since the last automated backup — and then upload it to their servers.
The cloud backup world has been changeable, some might even say stormy, in recent years. Personally, I have been a happy, longtime user of Backblaze, pleased with the ease of use and price. But Crash Plan moved away from consumer-based backup to focus on small business and enterprise-level clients, while Mozy got purchased by Carbonite in 2018 and was shut down altogether. Carbonite remains popular, and IDrive seems to be getting a lot of love from cloud-service reviewers lately.
Some of my clients tell me that they are wary of the cloud. They tell me they don’t like the idea of trusting some company with their valuable data in a space they can’t literally touch. So, I ask them if their bank lets them go into the vault and hand-count their money on an average Tuesday. No?
But it’s the same thing. You’re trusting your bank to hold onto your valuable financial resources, even though you can’t literally touch the money at a moment’s notice. But while you can download all your data from the cloud to recover a lost file or crashed computer at 3 a.m., the bank will only let you get a limited amount of money from an ATM in the middle of the night. (OK, granted, it’s not a perfect metaphor. There’s no governmental FDIC-equivalent in the world of cloud computing, but there is bank-level encryption and security!)
Remember that you’re weighing the likelihood of a failure of a data security company against relying solely on your amateur backup skills and praying that your pet or tiny human isn’t going to knock your expensive hardware to the ground or flood it with milk.
Cloud Photo by icon0.com
By the way, the “cloud” is just a fancy way of saying that you’ve uploaded data via the internet and that it lives one someone else’s computer. And that computer is one of a bunch of computers networked together as a “server farm.”
Yes, clouds and farms are usually fairly separated by several miles of airspace, but nobody sat down to create a hierarchy of metaphors at the dawn of the computer revolution. So, the cloud may be on skyscrapers up in the clouds, or underground in nuclear fallout shelters. At one point a decade ago, Google was looking at putting server farms on off-coast ships!
Anyhooooo, cloud service, like local backup to an external hard drive, requires some minimal initial labor, after which you can “set it and forget it.” A monthly or annual feel will be charged to your credit card or deducted from your bank account (depending on how you set it up), but otherwise, that’s all you have to do to ensure that all of your settings and documents are preserved as insurance against any computer-ish calamity.
Putting Them Together
The system you decide on needs to let you sleep easily at night. My own belt-and-suspenders approach means that I use:
- Time Machine to automatically back up my entire hard drive to the external drive that sits on my desk. This means that if something happens to the computer, but not to my whole house, I’ve got all my backups right here beside me.
- Backblaze to automatically back up my entire hard drive to the cloud, so I need not fear one of Tennessee’s tornados from eliminating twenty years of my business records.
- A flash drive with anything that I might need on a moment’s notice. It goes with me when I travel. However, now that Wi-Fi is accessible in most places, and most printers have a Wi-Fi option to print from a phone or tablet, my flash drive method has largely been replaced by storing files in Dropbox.
Personally, I don’t use the bootable clone option, though my colleague Jeri Dansky swears by SuperDuper. What matters is that you pick and combine multiple options that allow you to automate and guarantee regular and frequent backup.
IF YOU’RE FEELING BACKED UP AGAINST THE WALL
You may still be feeling stressed about the prospect of technology. That’s understandable, but the solution is not to bury your head in the sand. Just as you can’t avoid health checkups for fear they will be uncomfortable or problematic, you must not avoid setting up a backup plan.
Computer Against Brick Wall Photo by Tomasz Gawłowski on Unsplash
Whether you talk to your tech-minded grand-kid or neighbor, a professional organizer who specializes in technology organizing, or an IT specialist, do start the ball rolling. Here are some of the questions you might want to ask and then have them walk you through the solutions:
- How do I install the software?
- How do I schedule backups?
- How frequently should I run them?
- If just one file is corrupted or accidentally deleted, how do I restore the backup copy?
- If I have sensitive files, do I need to encrypt them before backing them up? How?
- If my whole computer crashes, can I use the clone boot it up? How?
- In my cloud service account, how far back will my backed-up files be stored? Are there different price points for keeping versions backed up longer?
- Will the cloud service system store multiple versions of files (one from each backup), or only the most recent copy?
Once you get all your questions answered and have everything set up, remember to test your backup system.
Even if you combine multiple automated backup systems with local and cloud backup, wackadoodle things happen, and you do not want any surprises if or when you have to recover data.
Really commit to a periodic test-restore of a backed-up file to make sure that data is being saved correctly. Don’t just set a reminder you might swipe away, but put it on your calendar and think of it as an essential, if annoying, appointment — like getting your teeth cleaned or having your oil changed.
In the comments section, tell me what backup strategy you employ. And if you haven’t been backing up your computer, let me know what you plan to start using, going forward.
Paper Doll Post:
I’m with you and have embraced redundancy. The one thing I could easily add is to make a flash drive backup of the most important, especially things I’m taking with me, say to meeting or presentation. Sometimes I find that Windows shops don’t talk nicely with my Mac, so being able to quickly throw my presentation onto their pc would be nice.
Never heard of the cloning idea!!
Exactly, Seana. Sometimes, a flash drive, while not in the least a full backup, can keep a small mismatch from being a big problem. All of these different options work together. What’s worrisome is that some people ONLY keep their files in Google Drive or Dropbox, and just one location in the cloud is no better than one location in the house. Redundancy in the digital world is definitely a safety mechanism!
And until Jeri told me about having a bootable clone years ago, when I was working on my book, I had no idea either!
Thanks for all the analogies to make this topic fun to read about. I use the combination approach of flash drives and hard drives. Thanks for the reminder to do it again soon because I have a new course and it is only in one place right now.
Thanks for reading; I’m glad you found this post fun. It sounds like you’re not automating the process, so I hope you’ll add that to your approach to prevent any hiccups.
Thank you for mentioning the flash drive. I had several small business clients who were not tech-savvy, and even though I had a backup system in place in my office, I wanted to make sure they also had a copy of their company’s data. So, I used flash drives and backed things up when I was finished my work. They had updated information that was “off-site” from my backup system every time. There were three files, one backup on my server, the original file, and the flash drive. It was a great system.
Sabrina, that’s fabulous. I think that we can preach the gospel of the “right” way to back up all we want, but coming up solutions that people will actually use is often the best way to get progress made. Your clients were lucky to have you!
In your opening scenario, I’m definitely Number 3 – confused. We have iCloud, Time Machine, and I keep a number of things in Google Drive (and of course Evernote is a bit of a backup as well). I’m *pretty* sure we have Crash Plan, but I need to double check on that – you’re inspiring me to get proactive. And, it certainly couldn’t hurt for me to add an external hard drive to the mix. I have no fear of the cloud, and I haven’t been avoiding – just not thinking about it lately!
Thanks for all of the helpful information, and for the Spock-with-goatee pic – Live long and prosper!
LOL, Sara, I think a lot of people fall into the #3 category. That’s why I kept this post strictly focused on computers. Although we can back up our computers to iCloud, some people back things up there but don’t have them saved to their Macs, to optimize space, not realizing that when they do cloud or local backup, they’re not backing up the things that are ONLY in iCloud. Yikes. In a future post, I will talk about backing up all the other things — and not always digital — in our lives.
I hate this subject, but you give great advice.
LOL! Nobody likes talking about backing up — and this was just the computer. I didn’t even talk about backing up a phone or a tablet, or other things we can (and never think about) backing up.
Thanks for reading, and your kind words, even though you hate the subject!