Reader Eric Desman writes:
Fred, You have always had a practical approach to layered backups. In 2018, what is your recommendation for backups? I currently backup to a local external hard drive and use Backblaze for off-site backups. I found an old version of Zipit.bat that made me think of this. :-o. — Eric
Your method, Eric, sounds good, and is probably all you need. (And good on you for making backups at all — too many people still don’t bother.)
Zipit.bat was from way long ago — maybe 15 years? It was a script to backup any given set of files or folders into a single, highly-compressed Zip file, with or without encryption/password-protection. I think the early versions used WinZip; later ones 7-Zip.
But now? I don’t use anything even remotely like that.
At one point in recent years, I had a seven-layer backup system — I wrote about it in the old LangaList — but that was when I was responsible for the billing records and email addresses of my subscribers. A seven layer backup seems excessive, but I wanted to ensure that (1) I’d never lose any of that data; and (2) the live and backed up data would be protected by physical and logical safeguards (separate networks, encryption, etc.) to keep subscriber information safe from snoops and data-thieves.
Today? I still use a very secure, multi-level backup system, but it’s highly automated — set-and-forget easy.
The foundation is a pair of apps built into Win10: File History and OneDrive. (Here’s an old WindowsSecrets article — Win10’s hybrid backup system — that describes them. Or, see Microsoft’s spiel here and here. )
File History is a pretty good, on-by-default, automated, near-real-time incremental backup feature that stores its backup files on an external drive. Thus, if my main drive dies or becomes inaccessible, I can recover very recent copies — as recent as 10 minutes ago! — from the external File History drive.
OneDrive is, of course, Microsoft’s cloud-storage service; you get a basic account for free with Win10. Although you can use OneDrive as a more-or-less cloud-only storage, I set it up to save a local copy of all its backed-up files on my hard drive (typically in a folder such as C:\Users\[username]\OneDrive\…).
(BTW: There can be virtually zero extra danger in storing files in the cloud if you employ high-quality local encryption (e.g. AES 256 or better) on any sensitive folders or files before they’re uploaded; the files will retain their full encryption when they’re synced to the OneDrive cloud. So, even if someone somehow hacks into your cloud-storage account and bypasses the cloud-providers own security, your sensitive files will still be safely encrypted and safe from prying eyes.)
Set up as I’ve described, those two Win10 native apps/services — File History and OneDrive — will give you three copies of every important file on your system: a copy in the local OneDrive cache, a copy in the cloud, and a copy on File History’s external drive.
Three backups, comprising local, detached, and remote storage, means that the odds of simultaneously losing all three copies are vanishingly small. Your data is about as safe as can be. (Eric’s backup method, described at the top of this article, achieves similar results.)
And note: Once it’s set up, everything I’ve mentioned so far is fully automatic, and built into Windows. No extra effort or software is required.
But, as a belt and suspenders guy, I also use two additional backup methods.
First, as described in Free templates automate your backup/copying/syncing tasks, I use a tool called Robocopy every day to create a local, live, byte-for-byte, clone of my Documents folder (and all its subfolders) in the local OneDrive folder; OneDrive then automatically syncs this to the cloud.
This gives me four copies of every important file — the live original copy in its native location (e.g. Documents), a copy in the local OneDrive folder, a remote copy (in the cloud), and a copy in File History’s external drive.
With the above, my data is safe from just about anything, and I also can use the various copies — especially in File History — for versioning; say, if I want to discard a whole series of changes and go back to a version of file from several days ago. (BTW: Win10’s Timeline puts a new face on this, but the ability has always been there, in File History.)
So, my data’s safe. But there’s more to a PC than its data: there’s also the setup, configuration, and customizations. I also use a standard image-backup tool (Macrium Reflect; free/paid; https://www.macrium.com/reflectfree ) to perform automatic daily incremental image backups, and an automatic once-a-month full image backup. I’ve never needed these, but they’re there in case I need to do a full, from-scratch system restore, in one go.
Yes, this is far more copies/backups than most people would ever need; but it serves my own belt-and-suspenders/no-byte-shall-ever-be-lost approach to backups and versioning.
And the only part that requires any routine manual attention is my once-a-day click to perform the Robocopy clone-backup (again, see Free templates automate your backup/copying/syncing tasks; https://wp.me/paaiox-3A).
I could even automate that, but come on— it’s literally one click at the end of the workday. Even I’m not that lazy! 🙂
So again: Your method, Eric, sounds good, and is probably all you need.
But if you want to go whole-hog and virtually guarantee that you’ll never, ever lose an important file, no matter what, now you have a few more ideas and methods to explore!
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