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A backing-up frenzy - keeping my digital life safe

mark zita
Updated ·5 min read
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Chores are a thing of life, like cleaning the house and doing the washing. If it's not done, the house gets messy and the clothing gets stinky. For me, regularly backing up my hard drive falls in that category of chores. It is one of those tasks that I would put off till tomorrow, not knowing what could happen to my data if something bad was to happen. I believed the time spent on backing up data on physical media could've been spent on more rewarding things - like baking a cake, or catching up on my favourite television shows on DVD.

I am constantly reminded of my experiences back in university. I was making semi-regular backups of my work to my external hard drive like any good student would. (Take 'semi-regular' very lightly - see above). One day, I was struck with fear when a computer virus had infected my 1TB hard drive. The pain of virus checking, reformatting and backing up every university assignment, my pictures and my music was something I'd rather not want to recall.

You may be wondering - why didn't you use cloud storage? I have to admit, I was late to the game when it came to that. I was a stern believer in physical storage, even after the experiences during my university years. In addition, this was 2007 - when cloud storage was only limited to Windows Live Folders. Who remembers that?!

Fast forward to today - cloud storage is something I can't live without. Technological advances and increase in internet speeds has made cloud storage more feasible. It has also made backing up less tedious. I have a three-pronged approach with my backups:

  • Cloud storage.

  • Physical storage

  • Offsite storage.

Cloud Storage

This is the main data source in my regular backup routine. I use Google Drive as my daily driver for backups. With 15GB of data available on the free tier, it is a great choice for anyone. Previously, I had used OneDrive in combination with my Office 365 Subscription. However, because of the recent changes to the service by Microsoft, I made the switch to Google Drive. A key feature of Drive is its integration with Google Photos. This is important for me because I have quite a bit of holiday snaps and personal mementos. Google Photos makes it easier to browse on a device like a phone or a tablet.

When I first started with cloud storage, I only selected my documents folder to be the regular backup folder to be synced daily. The initial backup was one-time for my photos and videos. This was to conserve bandwidth and to prevent syncing mistakes. After all, you wouldn't want an errant photo to be deleted or added and automatically synced to the cloud?! Any changes or additions I would manually sync.

As an extra layer of convenience, I used a tool called Mover.io to sync between cloud storage services. When I used OneDrive as the main backup source, I had kept Google Drive as the backup to the backup. There's no such thing as too many backups! I would highly recommend this to anyone who is a bit pedantic about the integrity of their data. Now with my OneDrive relegated to OneNote syncing only and Google Drive promoted to the main data source, I'll be setting the same thing up with my Dropbox. Mover.io is free for personal use.

It's all about being smart with cloud storage. Treat it the same as physical storage. Have as many as you can across many services.

Physical Storage

I don't recommend to anyone to solely rely on cloud storage. Heck, you shouldn't solely rely on physical storage either. They all have to compliment each other. In true fashion, I also have multiple formats for my physical storage backups. I have my most important photos and documents backed up on a 32GB USB flash drive. That flash drive is a mirror on what is contained in my Google Drive or Dropbox. Being flash based means the chances of data corruption is slim, but doesn't mean it'll still happen.

My general backup drive is a 1TB USB3 hard drive. It is formatted to HFS+ Journaled - the same file system as the Macintosh. The rationale behind this is that HDD is complimentary to the Mac, and would really be only accessed by that Mac. If I wanted to move data between computers, I would be using a USB stick or the cloud storage.

My backup routine is less with physical storage. I would do major backups every 6 months for both my 32GB USB and the HDD. Most of the time, I would pull the data from the cloud storage to put on the physical storage.

Do I use DVD's or CD's for my physical storage? Well that's what the next section explains...

Offsite Storage

If you're up to here now - you must think I am nuts with all these backup media and processes. It can be warranted! This would only make your opinion of me even more skewed! I have made DVD's of important photos and videos that I had given to a trusted friend of mine. You don't have to do this, but I'm a 'worst case scenario' kind of guy. I like to have peace of mind that my digital life is safe and I have many media to access it. So, if you want, find a trusted friend and give your data to them for safekeeping!

That's how I manage backing up my digital life. It may seem very crazy, and sometimes unnecessary, but I believe digital files are easier to destroy than physical files. With our world becoming more digital each day, it's highly important that we are still able to access our data after something bad happens.