The importance of backups!

[Brian G Turner]

Ohh, good point about ransomware - I have a paid-for anti-virus from Avast specifically because it includes anti-ransomware protection.

 

[Biskit]

When I did this IT thing for a living, backups were simple (and kept off-site with a specialist company to have the office up and running on an alternate site in 24 hrs if things went pear-shaped).
1: Backup daily, weekly, monthly.
2: Keep multiple copies.
3: Remember, your backup media is probably at least as fragile as your main storage. Tapes degrade, flash drives fail, hard-drives develop nasty grinding noises, DVDs quietly go flaky. So back it up, duplicate the backups, ditch old media as appropriate, rinse and repeat. Do all of that an you might only lose a little bit when it all goes toes up.

 

[Overread]

Things like ransomware are why if you've ever got really valuable data its sometimes prudent to consider having two computers - one online and one offline and which is only connected to the internet to perform basic updates to its OS.

The other trick is if you get ransomware the first thing to do is turn off the computer - typically via turning off the power. Sooner you shut it down (and cutting power sometimes is needed since regular "shutdown" commands can get overridden or delayed by the ransomware doing its thing) the less damage it can do

 

[sknox]

So, you know how we were talking about backups? Yeah, well, the barrel plug on my laptop broke. Bloop went the battery and hey presto my laptop turned into a brick. Chances are I don't fix the plug without replacing the motherboard. Time for a new computer.

By weird coincidence, just this morning my wife said she wanted to get me a new computer for my birthday later this month. So I started shopping. Went to get my laptop. You know, to search for laptops. <g> And that's when I saw 7% battery life. Yerg. At least it was going to be replaced anyway!

But, because I have all my files out on Dropbox, and have them backed up from my desktop computer to an external hard drive, it's really no more than the inconvenience of having to install my software tools, configuring some of them, and hey ho off I go. I don't doubt that somewhere in the coming weeks I'll find some small thing that was on that laptop and nowhere else, but I doubt it.

Backups, man. Truth.

 

[LukeLee]

I do all my writing on Scrivener on my iPad Pro and it automatically backs up and syncs with/to Dropbox. It’s useful because I can access it from other computers as well, but the original is on my iPad so I’m not simply trusting someone else’s computer.

 

[Elckerlyc]

That's still only considering the encryption aspect (and I doubt most people are sufficiently disciplined to ensure they've encrypted everything). But why go to that bother when you can do the backups yourself locally? Which I would certainly do anyway. I just don't understand why people are happy to trust all their private data to someone else's computer systems. It just seems completely bonkers to me. But that's just me. Call me paranoid if you want!

I wholeheartedly agree with you in this. But nowadays even companies are taken by the concept of working in the cloud. All your confidential data on a cloud-server, possibly even on another continent. Unattainable when the internet is down. Perhaps I'm old-fashioned in this, but no, thank you.
I 'd rather keep my data in-house.
Besides that, personally I have way too much data to be stored on the cloud for a reasonable price. Documents, music, e-books, photo's, movies and TV-series, it fills several Extension Backup drives.
For daily backups I trust my NAS-drive. Next to that I maintain 2 fully backups which rotate on a regular basis (though not regular enough). Both sets I keep in the house or take 1 set with me when go outdoors. Ideally you should keep one set in the care of a trusted friend, if there is one not too far from your place.
Alas, we do not live in an ideal world.

 

[Josh K]

I email my work to myself every day, so I always have 2 up to date copies. Though this may not work with larger files.