by Rachel Smith
21 June 2017
What are the best options for backing up data? I’ve just bought a laptop and have about 20 years of data on my old PC. It keeps me up at night knowing I have so many old stories, notes, and photos from my travels in so many different places – and yet, I am notoriously BAD at backing up. I’ve lost data before. You’d think I’d learn, but I never do. Help! BecI’ve been in your position, Bec – well, crying and rocking in the foetal position on the floor while my IT husband mutters, ‘I told you to back up. I’ve been telling you for months, Back Up, Back Up, Back Up! I even bought you a terabyte drive…’
But even journos whose husbands are IT consultants can still lose ALL their data. I know I’m not the only one with a horror story or two. And the ridiculous thing is, it’s not even hard to back up. It just makes my eyes glaze over and I’d rather do anything – anything – than back-up. But I’m getting much better at it after going two rounds with an insidious Russian virus and another website I built becoming a favourite with hackers (damn you, WordPress!) in the past few years alone.
And, recently I decided I no longer wanted to rely on devices. Well, I mean, I rely on them for the day to day – I’m not going to go live in a cave and chisel on a wall or anything – but when it comes to keeping my data safe, I want all of it in the cloud. I’m also doing so much client work now, I need my clients’ stuff to be safe too.
I researched a few options when I was looking for the right solution. In terms of what to consider, you want to go for a big, well-known player so you know your data is safe, and also one that enables you to easily move your data or download it if you need to. Those are really the main things. Options include:
An external hard drive. Mr Uber Security (aka ‘The Husband’) says Seagate is a great brand. I back up my data onto a hard drive once a month and in the cloud more regularly. This 2TB portable hard drive is under $100.
Dropbox. The easiest and most reliable system I’ve found. I upgraded to the 1TB plan, which costs $139 (annually). I’ve used it to bring all my files together from different computers (including years of photos) so I can find what I need fast. And yet, I still have a heap of storage space left. Pricing plans here.
Google Drive. A decent alternative to Dropbox and cheaper, too – around $100/year for 1TB. I use Google Drive for a lot of Rachel’s List collaboration and find it pretty easy to navigate. Check out the pricing plans here.
Microsoft OneDrive Seamless and easy to use, especially if you use Office 365 (which OneDrive is included with). The costs range from $89/year, but if you don’t want to or need to buy Office, you can still use OneDrive; 50GB of storage costs $2/month (5GB of storage is free). More info here.
CrashPlan At $69/year, it’s the cheapest online storage and comes recommended across the board. Enables you to back up online and to other devices and computers (even other people’s computers!). Check it out here.
Over to you, Listees… what do you use for backing up your data?
If anyone has a tip on USB sticks for backing up, I’m a regular happy user, and check things (on the sticks) every now and again to make sure all’s well. Thanks!
Thanks Robyn. If that works for you, that’s awesome. I know I would probably lose it (cue weeping and gnashing of teeth) 🙂
TAKE CARE: Backup is a somewhat technical game. You need to understand it, but you should seek out expert advice. The information above from Rachel is almost all wrong – sorry, Rachel – but one piece of it is right.
THE RIGHT BIT: CrashPlan is a capable backup system with a $A70 per year paid version that will do everything that many freelancers need doing. Comprehensive instructions on how to use it and why are at the New York Times’ Wirecutter site:
http://thewirecutter.com/blog/how-to-back-up-your-computer/
So the key takeaway here is YES, PAY FOR CRASHPLAN.
THE WRONG BITS: Neither an occasional USB stick copy, an external hard drive nor an online syncing system (Dropbox/Google/OneDrive) are true backup options. They can be really useful for protecting you against storage failure. But you can’t use them to roll back a system to a previous state.
Why does that matter? Because each of them will faithfully reproduce any problem that is introduced into one file, or thousands.
– If you accidentally alter a file in the wrong way, the syncing process will change it too.
– If you accidentally delete a file, or an entire folder, the syncing process will carefully delete it too.
– If you install some ransomware that encrypts all of your files, the external hard drive and the online drive will faithfully copy all those changes and all your files will end up encrypted in the synced copy.
Crashplan is proper versioned backup that will protect against all of the above. I have no interest in the company and have never used the product, but all reports agree it does the job most freelancers need done. Even if most freelancers don’t know what that job is.
Thanks shorewalker and pdog for your comments on what I can see is a very controversial issue 🙂
In my view, this is a case of semantics – I suppose, shorewalker, I should have said ‘data storage’ as that is essentially what I was proposing Bec do, and what I have done to mitigate disaster. External hard drives have saved my life (and my bacon) more than once. I take your point but I think you can have different versioned back-ups as pdog has mentioned above.
But yes, Crashplan as I mentioned does sound like a great option and maybe is a bit more hands-off for anyone who resists the whole back-up thing in general.
HI,
To address previous comments re backup:
– an external drive is indeed a viable, comparatively inexpensive back up option e.g. Apple Time Machine is pretty much as seamless as it gets and provides restores to any backed up point in time
– File versioning (as well as trashcan restore) exists for Dropbox, Google Drive and Microsoft One Drive:
I have actually used the above products predominantly in professional engagements (endorsed by enterprise legal teams) and never experienced issues with regards to file availability.
No product is perfect and a layered approach e.g. back up (cloud and/or external hard disk), file sync and version control could be the way to go, depending on your requirements.
Like the above mentioned products, Crashplan seems to have been around for a while and looks cost effective. Like the previous commentator, I also have not used it and cannot offer any real world experience/recommendation.
References:
https://www.dropbox.com/help/security/recover-older-versions
https://support.google.com/drive/answer/2409045?co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop&hl=en
https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Restore-a-previous-version-of-a-document-in-OneDrive-for-Business-159cad6d-d76e-4981-88ef-de6e96c93893
Gnashing goes on for me as well, as these little guys can very easily go missing. Can only share that lucky for me so far; they line up unobtrusively in a little see-through plastic envelope and tucked into a $2 shop stationery file that lives at side of the computer:):)