How to Protect Your Digital Files (Part 1)
When I was at MIT, a friend of mine was finishing his thesis after seven long years of work. It was going great! The artificial super-intelligence he had painstakingly built was just starting to print out the plans for a faster-than-light rocket ship … when his hard drive crashed. He did everything he could to try to save it. He even took it to the disk drive specialists who tried to reconstruct it bit-by-bit, using very tiny tweezers. Their efforts were to no avail. He lost everything. Seven years of work, lost.
And that, my friends, is why we don’t have faster-than-light travel today.
But we would, if only he had backed up his data. Don’t be him.
I know what you’re thinking: “Stever, did you fall into a time warp? No one loses data anymore. That’s a thing of the past!”
Alas, it isn’t. We’re so used to computers being reliable that we often don’t plan for when they fail. Things happen. Hard drives fail. Ransomware sneaks into your system and holds your files hostage. Backing up your data simply means making a copy of it somewhere for safe-keeping.
Make Local Backups
A local backup is a copy of your data that you keep somewhere nearby. Once upon a time, you could make a DVD or a CD with all your data as a backup. Since those are read-only, they made good backups. Evil ransomware couldn’t harm a backup once you made it. If you still have a DVD or CD drive, you might want to consider using one to make read-only backups of your data. The computer industry is migrating away from optical drives, though, so the days of the optical backup are numbered.
USB Hard Drives, however, are very affordable and they get relentlessly cheaper. So now, to back up my 2 Tb hard drive, I simply use a 4Tb USB drive. That drive is big enough to keep my most recent backup and the backup before that.
Use SuperDuper!
My computer is a Mac, and I use a very simple backup program called SuperDuper! from Shirt Pocket software. It copies my hard drive to my backup drive every night, making the backup drive bootable. If my hard drive gets trashed, I can plug in my backup drive and quickly be up and running. If I need an old version of a file, I just copy it directly from the backup drive. SuperDuper’s “smart copy” feature skips files that haven’t changed, so it doesn’t waste time copying files that don’t need to be copied.
Encrypt Your Backup Volume
Because the backup volume has everything that’s on your hard drive, encrypt the drive before you use it as a backup drive. That way, if your backup drive falls into the hands of Evildoers, they won’t be able to get to your data. On the Mac, this means using the Disk Utility program to format the drive as Apple Mac OS or Apple APFSEncrypted.
If you’re using Windows, you can use Windows 10 BitLocker to encrypt your hard drive. When you encrypt a drive, Windows will let you save a copy of your Bitlocker encryption key. Save it, to be safe, but think twice before uploading it to a cloud service. This isn’t your physical house. In the U.S., the Fourth Amendment says the government can’t search your house without a warrant. So you’ll know if they come knocking.
Most cloud providers, however, will turn files over to the government if the government simply asks. And even if they have a warrant, the warrant goes to the cloud provider, not you. So you won’t know if they’re rifling through your files. I know I sound like a conspiracy theorist, but don’t come crying to me if the government steals your top-secret design for chocolate-covered pistachio marble macaroons.
Save Versions with Time Machine or File History
Making a mirror image of a hard drive isn’t a perfect answer. You can go back to yesterday’s version of a file. But if you want to recover last week or last month’s version, you’re out of luck.
This is where Apple’s Time Machine program shines. It comes with every Mac. You simply get a hard drive to use as your Time Machine drive. Activate it, and as you change files, the changed versions get copied to your Time Machine drive. The system keeps as many old versions of files as it has room for on the Time Machine drive.
When you want to get back an older version of a file, just open Time Machine and you can scroll back and forth through time and grab the version of the file you want. Time Machine works, though it can be slow to start if you have a big disk drive with many versions of files.
Some individual applications support Time Machine. For example, when you’re working on a file, start Time Machine, and you’ll be able to view prior versions of the file from right within the application. For example, you can open Mail, start Time Machine, and browse your inbox from yesterday, or last week. It’s really quite neat.
A Time Machine drive saves everything on your hard drive. It can also be used to recreate your entire hard drive when you buy a new Mac. I actually have Time Machine use two external drives so I can back up tons of stuff and keep it for weeks.
Microsoft introduced a similar feature called File History. File History lets you back up your data and media files.
Of course, once upon a time, computers kept old versions of files as a matter of course. But since no one in Silicon Valley seems to learn from past work, those capabilities aren’t even a distant memory. I have no doubt someone will reinvent them in 10 years and they’ll be heralded as the Next Big Thing. Innovation is a funny thing.
Back Up External Drives
If you have any external hard drives, back those up also. I use an external hard drive for editing video. Stuff on that hard drive is irreplaceable. It’s also gigantic. So I use SuperDuper! to back up to another attached hard drive every night.
So I have a SuperDuper! backup for my main hard drive, two drives for my Time Machine, my Working Media hard drive, and my Working Media backup drive. Yes, this is a lot, but once I’ve set it up, I almost never have to think about it.
Then when I accidentally screw up a file, I can grab the prior version from the backup. Or in the case of Time Machine, I can grab a prior version from days or weeks ago.
Make Offsite Copies
Now I’m fully protected against accidentally screwing up my own files. But what happens if there’s a fire or flood? All my hard drives would be destroyed, even the backup drives. So if you really want to be safe, keep a copy of your backups off-site. Some people make an extra backup monthly, quarterly, or yearly, and store it in a safe-deposit box. I don’t do that, so I do risk losing all my media in the event of a physical disaster.
Thankfully, there’s another way! Now that we have Cloud storage, it’s possible to back things up to the Cloud. Stay tuned for part 2 of this episode, where we’ll explore the ups and downs of using the Cloud for backups.
If my friend at MIT had a good backup regimen, he would have graduated with flying colors. Flying faster-than-light, in fact. But you won’t bake the same mistake! You’ll have a daily full backup of your main hard drive, so you can get up and running quickly if your drive dies. You’ll have a Time Machine or File Version scheme to recover older versions of files you’re working on. And if you have an external drive full of critical data, you’ll back that up to. And when you release your faster-than-light rocket ship, you can express your appreciation for my advice with a teeny, tiny percentage of the profits. Ten percent will do nicely.
I’m Stever Robbins. Follow GetItDoneGuy on Twitter and Facebook. If you’re an entrepreneur, self-employed or otherwise need to control your own time, Get-it-Done groups help you start finishing what’s important, and develop the habits you need to be hyper-productive. Learn more at Stever Robbins.
Work Less, Do More, and have a Great Life!
Computer backup image from Shutterstock.
About the Author
Stever Robbins was the host of the podcast Get-it-Done Guy from 2007 to 2019. He is a graduate of W. Edward Deming’s Total Quality Management training program and a Certified Master Trainer Elite of NLP. He holds an MBA from the Harvard Business School and a BS in Computer Sciences from MIT.
