If you have never lost any of your digital life, count yourself as lucky. But start a good backup program today!
As an IT professional, too often I see some of my customers wake up to this only after a disaster happened. There are no excuse not to have at least a basic backup plan these days: external USB drives are inexpensive, and cloud-based solution can fully automate things for you.
L&LD
Part of the Furniture
Yes, only after a catastrophe do they consider their data worth spending a few minutes for (backing up).
Natural disasters, clumsy hands, theft and/or forgetfulness will get 99.9999% of the data and make it disappear for the original owners.
(Doing backup now to 2x NAS).
Natural disasters, clumsy hands, theft and/or forgetfulness will get 99.9999% of the data and make it disappear for the original owners.
(Doing backup now to 2x NAS).
Much like a fire drill in school, backup & recovery is easy if we'll planned.
sfx2000
Part of the Furniture
Very good advice - also many backup programs have options to check integrity of the backup files...
In the Enterprise world, I don't have to deal with it much anymore since there are people dedicated to it. I just have to make sure to tell them what I want backed up, how long, and verify from time to time that a restore works. And yes, the restore from backup has saved my arse more than once....as well as burned me when the restore failed....lucky for me, that was a complete goof on the backup team and not on me...but I still was the one who go stuck rebuilding a system from scratch.
In the consumer world, I preach to my friends and family constantly about backups. Too often they call asking if I can look at their computer since it stopped working and there are files/photos they must have off of it. My response...give me a week or two and I will see if anything is recoverable. The most effort I will put into anymore is yanking the drive and putting into an external drive sled to see if it mounts and I can grab files. Or their phone stopped working and they say they want photos off of it.....why were you not using the built-in features to sync your photos to the cloud?????
Then I yell at them for being stupid and not having any type of backup. As a standard consumer, there are so many free and paid options available that do it automagically for you. At a bare minimum use the free tier of OneDrive, Dropbox, GDrive, or others to keep your "important" stuff. If you want to backup more than just the specific folder, there are several other paid services that can do that. I have been using Carbonite for several years to keep my photos and other random crap backed up.
And of course...don't be stupid and ignore the security risks of the cloud. Don't keep critical financial/health data unprotected in the cloud. Make sure you have proper authentication setup to the cloud provider. And for f'sake, don't keep embarrassing stuff in cloud (thinking about celeb nudies that keep getting leaked).
In the consumer world, I preach to my friends and family constantly about backups. Too often they call asking if I can look at their computer since it stopped working and there are files/photos they must have off of it. My response...give me a week or two and I will see if anything is recoverable. The most effort I will put into anymore is yanking the drive and putting into an external drive sled to see if it mounts and I can grab files. Or their phone stopped working and they say they want photos off of it.....why were you not using the built-in features to sync your photos to the cloud?????
Then I yell at them for being stupid and not having any type of backup. As a standard consumer, there are so many free and paid options available that do it automagically for you. At a bare minimum use the free tier of OneDrive, Dropbox, GDrive, or others to keep your "important" stuff. If you want to backup more than just the specific folder, there are several other paid services that can do that. I have been using Carbonite for several years to keep my photos and other random crap backed up.
And of course...don't be stupid and ignore the security risks of the cloud. Don't keep critical financial/health data unprotected in the cloud. Make sure you have proper authentication setup to the cloud provider. And for f'sake, don't keep embarrassing stuff in cloud (thinking about celeb nudies that keep getting leaked).
sfx2000
Part of the Furniture
When I set up a system for family members, I get them started up front with backup - even the basic TimeMachine on Macs is better than nothing...
Windows 7 and 10 - backup and restore tools are included with Windows - pretty basic, and there are other packages that do a 'better' job - but it's there, and easy enough to set up and run on a regular basis..
Don't forget about the smart devices - as @MichaelCG mentions - cloud sync is easy enough to set up...
Windows 7 and 10 - backup and restore tools are included with Windows - pretty basic, and there are other packages that do a 'better' job - but it's there, and easy enough to set up and run on a regular basis..
Don't forget about the smart devices - as @MichaelCG mentions - cloud sync is easy enough to set up...
Windows 8 introduced a little known feature called File History. It sound a bit like Time Machine, as it allows you to automatically archive previous copies of your documents on a remote location. I set it up for a customer a few months ago after she accidentally lost a document she was working on locally (she wanted to finish it before moving it to the company NAS). So now, her file history is backed up on the QNAP.
Sadly, this nice new feature was overshadowed by all the bad things Windows 8 brought to the table. If it weren't for Metro, Windows 8 would have been a really nice product.
What I don't like however is since Windows 8, Microsoft has been burying the incredibly useful System Restore feature. It's impossible to find it unless you know what you are looking for. I cannot count how many system's I've quickly recovered through System Restore over the years.
My recommendation for home users are the following tools:
Acronis True Image (for complete disaster recovery capabilities) (commercial)
FreeFileSync (for syncing a local folder with a remote or a USB one) (Freeware, but installer has adware that must be rejected)
FBackup (basic backup program, I use it for some customers to backup local documents to a NAS share) (Free version is enough for basic uses, they have a commercial version too)
Carbonite (cloud backup, if you want something 100% fire-and-forget, and have the increased security of providing your own encryption key, so they can't access your data) (monthly fee)
I personally use ATI, FreeFileSync and Carbonite at home, and all four for various customers.
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