It's NOT A Backup Solution

YOU SHOULD BACKUP YOUR FILES!  I'll bet your eyes are already glazing over.  We all know it & some of us do it, but it's BORING.  The only exciting part is that butt-clenching moment when you realize you just lost a file you've spent hours working on or all your pictures disappeared & you don't have any good way to get them back.  Then the excitement is replaced by black despair.

Restoring is the objective.  You want a restore solution.  Backing up is just a means to an end.  I'll cover some for Windows.

If I lose that file I worked on for hours by carelessly deleting it or even its directory, it shouldn't be a problem.  The Recycle Bin should have it.  If not, there should be a previous version.  Right click on the directory that held it, left click on 'Properties', & again on the 'Previous Versions' tab.  You should see a bunch.  Check one of your document directories now.  If you don't see any previous versions, enable it.  Google how for your version of Windows.

You need a computer that is working & can read the files to restore to, of course.  You might have to rebuild a machine from scratch, patch it to a working level, & finally restore the files or you might have to buy a new one.  Either one can take a while, so keeping a working spare around isn't a bad idea.  A Windows 7 machine I rebuilt recently needed a gigabyte of patches & I needed a second PC because the network connection wouldn't work until I downloaded new drivers.  I lost count of the number of times I rebooted it.  Even with a good fiber connection & fairly constant attention, it took me 2 days, so it's worth spending some time to make sure bare metal restores are easy to do.  You can create Windows Recovery Disks & use its backup, but that's what took me 2 days.  It was all the user had & it was better than nothing.

I use Clonezilla (It's free!) to make an image of my PC once a year or so.  It's not the easiest program to use, but there's a lot of FAQs out there to help the novice.  I recommend making a disk image & an image of each partition.  If a replacement disk is even 1 byte smaller, the disk image often won't restore, but the partition images usually will.  I update only the Windows partition image every year or so.  That means at most I have a year of patches to install & changed files to copy over.

At home, I have a couple of 3tb (terrabyte) USB drives to store most of my files, including the Clonezilla images & backup files from my C:\ drive.  I backup with Allways Sync.  Selected files on the C:\ drive are copied to USB drive 1 (USB1) with all modifications & deletions every night.  Another job copies all files from USB1 to USB2 once a week, but doesn't modify or delete existing files, just creates new ones if there is any difference.  USB2 is kind of a mess & has a lot of duplication, but that's OK.  There's plenty of extra room & it's an added level of protection.  Once a week, Scandisk runs on the USB drives & I check for errors.  (A bad error will show as weird directories.)  If I see anything that looks ugly, I'll buy another drive & retire the old one.  I don't wipe it, but keep it in the closet, just in case.

You think I'm crazy, don't you?  Just remember that a new USB drive is less than $100 & I buy a new one every few years.  Allways Sync cost $25 & I buy a new copy for each computer.  You probably spent more at Starbucks today than I spend on my restore solution in a month.  I spend it because I've learned the hard way just how badly it hurts to lose files.

I've been saving various pictures, documents, & other portable files for over 30 years.  I still have a copy of the gun control topic in the Jerry Pournelle RoundTable on GEnie which I grabbed with my Atari using Aladdin & a 1200 baud modem.  (If you get that, you're a nerd. If you don't, here is a quick explanation.) I'm not trying to prove that I'm a pack rat, but that I have a lot of old, unique files that are impossible to replicate & that brings up two other issues.

The first is file integrity.  Files aren't always copied &/or stored reliably.  As a drive fails, it can corrupt a file.  That corruption can look like a modification which is then propagated to the backup files.  Drive space is cheap.  Losing a beloved photo is not, thus the messy, oversized USB2 drive.

The second is proprietary file formats.  Switching from the Atari to a PC was a good learning experience.  No programs & few file formats transferred between them.  Even Microsoft files haven't transferred over the years.  My first PC had DOS 3.1.  I doubt it had any programs in common with my Windows 10 machine & I'm not going to update the format of all my files every few years, so I store files in generic, well supported formats.  Digital Rights Management (DRM) schemes also have limited lives, but I'll discuss that can of worms in a separate post.

The cloud is handy for quick, portable access, but it's not a restore solution nor is it completely trustworthy.  How long would it take to restore a terrabyte of data over your Internet connection?  Don't forget to factor in throttling over 10gb or whatever your monthly limit is. 

Worse,  your files may not be secure & I don't just mean from hacking, but from the service itself.  Apple wound up deleting a lot of privately owned music once & Amazon has deleted entire user accounts along with all their files.  It isn't likely to happen to you or me, but I don't want to take the chance.

Anyway, that's what 'back up' is all about - planning for future retrieval of files either singly or enmasse.  It's not hard to do, but it means regularly thinking about the process from the flip side.  How hard will it be to restore this file if I need to?  How accessible will it be in 5 or 10 years?