Have you ever heard of the CIA? No, not the spooky intel organization, the infosec triad. In infosec, CIA stands for Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability. One important thing you can do for yourself is to create an environment of high data availability.
If your internet goes down for a while, how might you access those cute cat pics and videos? If your Instagram account gets hacked and you lose access to your pics, whatcha gonna do?
So it’s important to think about the data that is important to you now and may be for some time into the future. That data you’ll want to back up. When you do, consider the following.
Backup Methodologies
One type is called a differential backup. To start this one, you fully backup your system. Then, each day thereafter, you backup all the accumulated changes since your last full backup. At some time, lets say each week, when you conduct another full backup, your intermediate backup resets.
(Source: Professor Messer’s YouTube video, Managing Backups - CompTIA A+ 220-1102 - 4.3)
Another type is called an incremental backup. In this one, again you’d start by conducting a full backup. Then each day you’d create a backup of only the changes from the previous day. Then on the full backup day, you’d incorporate each interim backup.
(Source: Professor Messer’s YouTube video, Managing Backups - CompTIA A+ 220-1102 - 4.3)
Check out Professor Messer’s video on this on YouTube. His video makes things very clear.
Or, you can be lazy like me (but seriously, be better than me) and every so often just take a full backup of all the data on your system. Really, I should become more systematic about this, but I haven’t gotten there yet.
Technologies
So once you’ve decided how you want to approach backing up your data and your systems, what technology do you need to get’r done?
One thing you can do is rely on storing some of your data in your email. Just send yourself an email with the data attached and it shall live there forever which is convenient. The downsides are that your email provider probably then has access to your data and if you ever lose access to your email, you’ll lose the data.
You could also store your data in a cloud service such as Google Drive, Microsoft’s OneDrive, or whatever Apple calls theirs (ya, I’m not going to give it the satisfaction of researching it.) If you don’t know how to use these, just Google it. You could also use other third party cloud systems such as DropBox. Again, though, you may lose data privacy for storing it on these systems.
Finally, you could use any number of hardware technologies to store them like us dinosaurs used to. Flash drives, sometimes called thumb drives, are convenient, cheap, and easy to use for storing data. These small devices can have a bunch of storage capacity, so don’t overlook them.
If you don’t have a lot of data and you want your backup to last a long time, you could burn your data to a CD. If you have more data than a CD can hold, you can jump up to a DVD or even a BluRay disk. Of course, most computers these days don’t have the optical drives necessary to read and write to CDs, DVDs, and BluRays. Fear not, the drives are fairly cheap to buy.
You can use Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) that are typically a bit slower but have high amounts of storage for relatively cheap. Or you can use Solid State Drives (SSDs) that are flash memory (so no moving components) and you can get high capacity drives, but they’ll cost more than HDDs. These drives can either be integrated into your computer or you can buy external drives to use separately.
Of course, consider using multiple technologies.
Continuity
Have you ever heard of the 3-2-1 rule regarding data backups? Well if you haven’t, you have now. Boom. Done.
Just kidding. This rule dictates that you maintain three copies of the backed up data on two different types of media (cloud, flash drive, DVD, etc), and one of those copies are kept somewhere else.
I usually take the last point to be at least one offline backup.
So I back up my data in a combination of Google Drive, external hard drives, email, and CDs. Again, you can be more thoughtful and rigorous than I am if you want to make your lives easier.
Additional Resources:
Professor Messer’s Video on backups:
https://www.seagate.com/blog/what-is-a-3-2-1-backup-strategy/
How do you backup data at home? I bet it’s pretty easy.