Your backups aren’t safe!
Follow our tutorial before it’s too late
Does backup get your back up? It shouldn’t. A robust backup routine ought to be fuss-free and transparent – if it isn’t, you’re far less likely to keep your archives updated. That means that when things go wrong and you need to recover a lost file, the crucial documents you’ve been working on may not have been backed up.
Even if you’re trying to do everything right, your chosen backup method may not be as comprehensive or bulletproof as you thought. And that should be a big concern: small businesses can’t afford to have things go wrong when it comes to backup, and home users stand to lose precious documents, photos and videos if their backup system lets them down.
Over the next four pages, we’ll show how to protect your local, cloud and web-based files in a truly reliable way – and find out why your current backup regime may not cut it.
SYNC VERSUS BACKUP
Let’s clear one thing up right away: synchronisation isn’t backup. Cloud-syncing services are an easy, effective way to keep vital files updated across several machines. However, if you’re relying on a service like this to save your skin in the case of an IT emergency, you’re running a serious risk.
Take Dropbox as an example. Not only does Dropbox duplicate your files onto every computer you own, it also keeps its own set of backups – so you can roll back to an earlier version of a file, or bring deleted items back from oblivion. This feature can be a lifesaver: to recover a deleted file, you can just log in through the browser, click Files, then click “Deleted files” in the sidebar. Find the file you want to resurrect and click Restore.
The catch is that changes and deleted files are only stored for 30 days, after which they’re purged. So while Dropbox can rescue you from short-term problems, it’s no use when you need to restore a document that was changed or deleted a few months
ago. You can extend the window to 120 days by upgrading to a Dropbox Professional account, but it’s expensive: it costs £199 annually, or £19.99 per month.
It also still doesn’t count as a proper backup solution. A dedicated backup service should allow you to recover files that were deleted years ago, or step back through a complete history of changes to a document. Not only is this essential for data security, it also provides a helpful audit trail so you can track the development of your projects. Some backup services even offer an authentication service that can be used to prove that a file was created or edited on a certain date.
Although we’ve picked on Dropbox here, it’s by no means an outlier. Similar issues apply to Google Drive, iCloud, OneDrive and so on. Syncing services should be used for just that – syncing – and backup left to tools designed with that task in mind.
THE 3-2-1 STRATEGY
When it comes to backup, the standard advice is that you should keep three copies of anything that matters, in two different formats, with at least one of them off-site – an approach known as the 3-2-1 strategy. The last point is very important: no matter how diligently you back up your system, if you store your media right next to your PC then it will be equally susceptible to fire, flood and theft – another reason why your backups might not be as safe as you would hope.
The good news is that off-site backup is easy. There are plenty of cloud-based backup providers who will, for a modest subscription, handle everything. However, this is normally on a “best-effort” basis; they won’t be held liable for any lost data. For safety, speed and convenience it’s a good idea to keep local backups as well.
Ideally, you want your local backups to be updated in real-time, so that every time you update a file the backup gets updated, too. You can get close to this using Windows’ File History feature (or Time Machine on macOS), with a NAS or a USB drive as your destination. If you’re serious about backups then ideally you should also keep a second regularly updated set, to provide an extra layer of robustness against glitches and disasters. This should be on a different medium to your primary backups: using a pair of hard drives is much safer than two folders on one drive.
This is another place where it’s tempting to rely on cloud services, but here’s a cautionary tale. Apify founder Jan Čurn lost 8,000 photos after he uploaded them to Dropbox, then tried to remove them from his local hard disk, to free up space.
In theory, he should have been fine. He used Dropbox Professional’s Smart Sync feature, which is supposed to store your files in the cloud, and download them on demand. However, Čurn recalled that the Dropbox client crashed during the initial sync operation, so he unsynced his photo folders by hand. “Everything worked well, the directories disappeared from the local hard drive, but they were still available on Dropbox’s website. All good,” he wrote on Medium.
But, two months later, Čurn discovered that the photo folders were empty on the server, too. “[It] seems that the Dropbox client first deletes files locally before it informs the server about the new selective sync settings,” he noted. “Consequently, if the client crashes or is killed before the server is contacted, the files remain deleted without any trace. After the client restarts again, it only sees there are some files missing and syncs this new state with the server.”
Dropbox’s engineering team managed to recover 1,463 of Čurn’s files, but the rest were lost. It’s a reminder of another key principle: a backup is a copy. If you only have one copy of something, it’s not a backup.
SCHEDULING A BACKUP
If your backup routine relies on you remembering to update your archives then it’s liable to fail; dedicated backup tools either run continuously, or update your backups at regular intervals. Most backup tools take an incremental approach, so only new and updated files are stored, which saves time and keeps storage demands down. It can also save you money, by postponing the day when you need to invest in a larger repository for your backups.
“SYNCING SERVICES SHOULD BE USED FOR JUST THAT – SYNCING – AND BACKUP LEFT TO TOOLS DESIGNED WITH THAT TASK IN MIND”
Set the smallest practical interval for each incremental backup. Hourly is by no means too often: ask yourself whether you could afford to lose a morning’s work if a lunchtime power cut corrupted your drive and wiped out several hours of productivity. However, if you’re working with a capped broadband connection, it makes sense to limit your cloud backups to run during unmetered hours (typically overnight), as long as you also have local backups running throughout the day.
Don’t rely entirely on incremental backups, though. Taking periodic full backups allows you to quickly and easily restore your complete system to a recent state; mixing incremental and full backups is just as important as storing them in several locations.
USING WINDOWS’ BUILT-IN BACKUP TOOLS
Windows’ integrated tools make it very easy to maintain local backups. Start by enabling the File History tool, which uses a connected drive or NAS as a repository for key files, including your Libraries, the Desktop, contacts and favourites.
To find it, open Settings’ Update & Security pane, and click Backup in the sidebar (or just search Cortana for Backup). Click “+” beside “Add a drive” and select a connected storage device. This only searches for USB drives; if you want to use a NAS, wait for it to fail, then click “Show all network connections” and select the volume you want to use.
It may look like nothing has happened, but click out and back into Backup and you’ll see that the “Add drive” button has been replaced by a switch toggled to On to activate the backup. Click “More options” below this to specify what’s included in the backup set, how frequently you want it to back up (between every ten minutes and daily) and how long the backup set should be kept. You can also invoke an immediate backup.
With this done, Windows will start quietly and continuously backing up your modified files. If you need to recover a file or folder, navigate to it in Explorer and click the History button in the ribbon to view and restore old versions and deleted files.
BACK UP YOUR CLOUD FILES
As we’ve mentioned above, entrusting your files to a cloud-syncing service doesn’t guarantee their safety – so you should make sure your local folders are included in your backup sets, so that files stored on sync services such as Dropbox, OneDrive and iCloud should be backed up automatically. Simply keep their client apps running the whole time your PC is active to keep the copies updated.
“ONCE YOU’VE SET UP YOUR SYSTEM, MAKE SURE YOU THOROUGHLY TEST YOUR ABILITY TO RESTORE FILES”
With Google Apps, things are a bit more complicated. Google prefers that you work through the browser when editing documents, and the “files” it stores on your local machine are only web links that launch each file in the relevant Google web app. This means that the files on the server are your only copy – which is, of course, a dangerous situation to be in.
The solution is a tool called InSync ( insynchq.com), which downloads the files themselves – including files others have shared with you – and converts them to Microsoft Office or OpenDocument formats so you can open them locally. Synchronisation and translation works both ways, too, so any edits you make on your PC will be sent back to the server, effectively giving Google Drive the same offline features Office 365 enjoys through its association with the offline Office apps. You can buy a lifetime licence for a very reasonable $30.
BACK UP YOUR WEBSITE
If you keep a blog, or use a CMS to manage your website, it’s important to think about backing that up. Even if you’re using managed hosting or a shared server, it’s asking for trouble to keep all your data in one place: hosts can – and do – go bankrupt, disappear or suffer DDOS and malware attacks.
Automattic’s VaultPress ( vaultpress.com) is a comprehensive backup tool for WordPress blogs, which backs up not only your database, but your themes, settings, system files and uploads, too. It starts at $39 per year for daily backups with a 30-day archive, uptime monitoring, and protection against brute force attacks, comment and pingback spam.
If you don’t need something quite so heavyweight, check out the free BackWPup WordPress extension, which can back up your site to Dropbox, S3 or an FTP server. To install it, hover over Plugins in your WordPress Dashboard, click Add New, and type “BackWPup” into the search box at the top of the following screen.
Similar backup tools are available for other CMS platforms, and many hosting control panels feature backup tools for flat-form or non-managed sites. Parallels Plesk lets you schedule both incremental and full backups of your data and configuration; by default the destination is a folder on the same server, which isn’t ideal, but you can send it to a separate FTP server and password-protect the resulting archive.
Backup isn’t exactly an exciting topic, but we’ve seen how easy it can be using Windows’ built-in tools, and user-friendly software such as O&O DiskImage Professional and Paragon Backup & Recovery. Throw in a dedicated off-site backup service such as Backblaze or Carbonite and you’ve easily satisfied the requirements of a dependable 3-2-1 backup strategy. There’s just one more thing to say: once you’ve set up your system, make sure you thoroughly test your ability to restore files, before you need to rely on it for real. A subtle configuration error could mean that you’re not backing up all the files you thought you were, or you could discover that your connection to the cloud storage server is too slow to bring you back online in an acceptable time frame. If you do find any issues, you’ll be glad that you ironed them out while the going is good.