Backing Up Your Data

You have a computer, and you have data on your computer, and you will lose your data at some point. You probably already have, but if you haven't, you will soon. I (Richard White) have personal knowledge of students who have:

• dropped their laptop
• spilled drinks on the keyboard
• had their laptop stolen
• had their hard drive fail (many PCs, some Macs)
• had Microsoft Office crash and corrupt a Word document

Computers are replaceable, but your data is not. How will you recover your data when it is lost?

Here is your backup strategy

This strategy is called the "3-2-1" backup plan:

• 3 copies of your data
• 2 copies in different formats
• 1 copy "offsite"

What does this actually mean? What does this look like?

You should have:

• Three copies of your data (at least).
  This typically includes:
1. a copy of your files on your computer
   This is the "working" copy of your data, the copy of your files that you typically carry around with you and use on a day-to-day basis. It might be a song you downloaded, a picture you took, an essay you wrote in Word, or a program for wrote for this class. That's one copy.
2. A copy on an external hard drive or USB flash drive at home
   This is a "local backup," a copy of your data that you keep on hand in case you need to recover from a mishap. Current versions of Microsoft Windows and macOS allow you to use the system software to create backups of your computer onto an external drive. All you have to do is get an external hard drive (something like this), plug it in, and let the machine do it's thing.
   
   Getting an external drive costs a little money, and typically requires that you plug the drive into your computer once every day or so. When something goes bad, though, you'll be glad to have this.
3. A copy "in the cloud"
   A third copy is a necessity because people sometimes fail to make backups to those drives as frequently as they should, and... backup drives fail, too.
• Two copies in different formats
  Hard drives, solid-state drives, flash drives, CD/DVDs... these all store data in slightly different ways, and each device is susceptible failure in different ways. If you've already placed a copy of your laptop's SSD data on an external disk drive at home, you're all set. Of if you're using a cloud-based backup, you're taken care of (although you should still have a local backup at home).
• An offsite backup
  

  Why backup to the cloud?

  "I don't want to know what your backup plan is. I want to know what you do when your backup plan fails."

  If the first two copies of your data are destroyed, you'll be happy to have a third copy stored off-site, someplace where you can get it if needed. There are lots of creative strategies for trying to manage this cloud copy on your own, but most people I know pay $5/month or so to have professionals keep a copy. Look at Backblaze and sign up for their services.

  Can't I just use Dropbox or Google Drive?

  There are also free cloud-based storage options available, including services like Dropbox, Google Drive, and Apple's iCloud Drive. While it's possible to store documents in some of these services, for the most part they are not designed to back up your entire computer.

  Quality and ease of use vary as well.

  For "set it and forget it" reliability, a simple strategy that involves working on your computer and having Backblaze automatically back up my files on an ongoing basis has worked perfectly.

For further information, see Backblaze.com's Backup Your Computer.

What if I'm really paranoid about losing data? What do I do then?

People who have data that they want to keep learn about and develop strategies of their own to make sure that they are well-and-truly backed up. There are systems that are both more robust and more complex that you can use to backup your stuff, both those are mostly beyond the scope of this course.

If you have an interest in learning more about some of these more sophisticated strategies, please contact the instructor.