I’ve asked that question numerous times to friends and to businesses and the responses have been varied. Usually after something catastrophic has happened, you’ll find me here picking up the pieces. My job is a data risk management consultant, which is a posh way of saying I help people and companies protect their data. I’m there to help recover their data, when the worst has happened and also help plan to mitigate against it.
Here in Yorkshire we have a saying “it’’ll be reet” (it will be alright) normally as an excuse for not doing a thing that should have been done. This is often said about backups, when you ask “did you take a backup before you did that?”
We are very much on our own, now we are more home based. Help from IT is not always available. This is especially true for some of you who have stepped in the brave new world of working for yourself.
A spyware infection, or a hardware failure could lead to you not working; having good backups will let you sleep easier at night knowing if something went wrong you’d be able to recover from it.
If what you do with your computer is important for you to earn money, then it’s worth paying attention to it and protecting that work. It’s a good idea to have a plan, and think about what data is critical and what is not. Also think about the likely things to fail? The computer? The software? Your internet connection?
The Plan
In the world of enterprise IT, we talk about an idea called a Recovery Time Objective (RTO), that’s a measure of how long it is before you need to be back online and working. It’s worth thinking about that on a personal level too, would a broken computer mean you couldn’t meet a deadline and so not get paid?
Another idea that’s been around forever in one form or another is ‘Backup 1,2,3’. A thing is not backed up if you do not have 3 copies of it in different locations, which are Onsite, Offsite and Offline. I’ll take each of these in turn.
1. Onsite — A backup on an external disk. So if your computer fails or is stolen you have a copy of it.
2. Offsite — A backup on a Cloud provider (OneDrive, DropBox etc). In the event you are say flooded out, robbed, or have a house fire your data is still accessible but not at home.
3. Offline — A backup on an external disk unplugged and if you are really going for it in a different location say store a copy at your parents’ house or a friends. If the data is offline it cannot be corrupted by a virus or accidentally deleted.
If we take those two ideas of RTO and Backup 1,2,3, we can make a pretty decent plan that will like all good insurance hopefully never be needed. It will need a little work to set up but once done, you’ll be glad you’ve got it.
How to Do it?
Let’s look at our backup plan. I’m going to do this for a hypothetical copy writer , Bob who gets paid by the hour, so you can see how this might work.
- What’s your RTO?
I can be offline for a day, but ideally like not to lose more than a few hours work. - What do you use?
I use Windows 10 and Word for much of my content creation on a Surface Pro5
So for Bob, we need a way of protecting Windows and also a way to quickly get him back up and running in the event of a failure.
The first step is to protect his work; much of what we need is already built into Windows 10. OneDrive, File History and System Restore will help us achieve some levels of protection. Also he’ll need an external hard disk. I’d recommended getting the biggest one he can afford.
Here’s how those Windows features fit together to achieve our RTO and get us backup 1,2,3
1. File History will be setup to automatically backup his files to the external disk. It’s very easy to set up and as long as he saves his files in Documents they’ll get backed up to the disk. By default it will backup any new data every hour. This meets our Online Backup requirement and also helps with quick document recovery. To restore a file is just a right click away; as multiple versions are kept we can revert to an earlier version if we get hit by ransomware.
2. OneDrive, Bob has Office 365 which comes with a 2TB OneDrive ready for him to use. We just sign into it in Windows; here we can specify folders that are stored in the Cloud and as long as there is an internet connection your files will be safely backed up. This meets our Offsite backup requirements, although the data is still vulnerable if Bob gets a ransomware infection as the infected files will just be replicated to the Cloud.
3. System Restore is a tucked away option that will let Windows take a snapshot of the running configuration. We can schedule a restore point at a fixed time each day. This setting will let Bob recover from a corruption of Windows caused by a bad software install. File History can then be used for any files that were changed before the restore point was created.
The only option we can’t get with this configuration is an offline copy of Bob’s data. This can be important if you have a ransomware attack and it corrupts your data. Using paid for tools we can achieve all these options but here I just wanted to show what was possible with native Windows tools and an external disk.
While not ideal, with an hour’s work we can have a relatively well protected setup, and it does give us a great deal more protection than just hoping it’ll be reet … as we say here in Yorkshire!
I plan to write two more guides where I’ll go into more depth on how to protect data in Windows and MacOS, on a budget and spending a little cash.