YSK The Backup 3-2-1 Rule

Why YSK: If you have digital data that is important, (family photos, crypto keys/wallets...). Back it up and prevent permanently losing it.

3 different places its saved to, (iPhone, ICloud, laptop, Facebook, Google, Camera SD, Flash drive...).

2 different media, I would consider iPhone and iCloud the same. Buying two External Drives of the same type and brand too. Why? Consider losing your Apple account or the drive model fails in a year.

1 off site copy. If all your copies are in your house, a flood, fire, tornado, hurricane, EMP... would lose every thing.

0 time to waste. (My own personal add). Do it now. Procrastination is dangerous and is the biggest regret for when things go sideways.

jetsetdorito,

Any software recommendations for backing up to an external drive?

npastaSyn,

External Drives come with software now to help people sync the data, (for the less techincal).

You could also just manually copy the data by clicking and dragging.

I'm kind of a command line junkie so I use robocopy in scripts.

Double_A,
@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

If you want something simple that just copies / syncs the files. FreeFileSync is the best free one.

There are also Backvp2 and GoodSync with more features, but they are paid.

PasTryPuff,

Thanks for this! Its a great tip but just wondering how you all remember where you save your passwords? I've tried different methods but sometime my usual method is not available when I create new accounts and subsequently forget which password is saved where

npastaSyn,

Password management is another big topic that is pretty big.

Something as simple a writing it down on paper in a safe location works for some.

https://bitwarden.com/

https://1password.com/

Are also other options.

chryan,

Use a password manager.

I've used Bitwarden for years to generate passwords for any account I need to create.

It works well on your phone and has Chrome and Firefox extensions to easily autofill your passwords for login.

vinnymac,

A paper trail for your master password, somewhere secure is good. Password manager companies have been breached in the past (see LastPass), so rotating your passwords and signing up for breach alerts will help save you from disaster.

qqq,

I had shared this on Reddit, but have since deleted it everything I've done on my reddit accounts. I'd like to share: Synology NAS Backups with Minimal Bus Factor

npastaSyn,

I probably got an answer from you there. Thanks for sharing.

AFKBRBChocolate,

I'm still distrustful of cloud storage - call me a fossil - so I do my own. I have a NAS drive that's in raid 0 mode, so the two physical drives are always shadowed: if one fails, I get an alarm, can unplug and replace it with zero down time. All the devices in the house have access to the NAS, so we use it instead of the local drives for anything important. Then I have an external USB drive that I keep in a drawer at work, and I bring it home every month or so and copy the NAS to it.

Probably not a perfect solution, but seems to work.

npastaSyn,

Trust level can vary. Publicly shared photos I would suspect you'd be okay with. Your crypto wallet... less so. Everyone needs to work out what's best for them, however, the original point is ... don't have all your eggs in one basket. Backup your data.

shiftenter,
shiftenter avatar

Hmm, wouldn't that be RAID 1? I thought RAID 0 was striping, where if a drive fails you are screwed.

It's probably super unlikely, but I'd still be paranoid about that one day where your external drive is home and something happens (fire, flood, etc).

I did something similar until I went full remote. I just had two externals and would update one before going to work and take the out of date one back home.

Totally understand being distrustful of cloud storage. But there are a lot of great solutions that are end to end encrypted. I've had good luck with https://rclone.org in the past. They support so many cloud services, it's insane. You can set your own encryption key.

AFKBRBChocolate,

Right, raid 1, it's been a long time and I had them backwards in my brain.

Yeah, I think the chance of a disaster happening when my external drive is home and it's one for which I can't grab my NAS on the way out the door are infinitesimally small - in not going to overly worry about it.

npastaSyn,

Two drives is a good thing. Always have a copy at a remote location and swap it out rather than shuttling the one drive back and forth.

rclone is a good solution. I use it myself. I also just found out about syncthing which is great for syncing with your phone to something to the local network.

cowvin,

It took me a while to accept cloud storage but I use it now. I backed up all of our family photos on Google photos.

npastaSyn,

It is an insane tool to get the data moved / shared / copied / transfered quickly. The risk is sharing to sources you didn't want, like the service provider, (look up Rick and Morty work being deleted due to copyright infringement...off the writers account). Also what if your account is stolen / hacked / deleted and Apple / Google / MS... aren't being cooperative with recovery.

Double_A, (edited )
@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

The sad thing is that nowadays this could be easily achieved without any extra cost. Most people have a PC, a smartphone and some kind of cloud storage. Yet people don't know, or can't even be bothered until something happens.

E.g. it's an easy thing to copy your photos to your PC, leave them on the phone, and also sync them to Google photos or something.

grandiosocrown,

I am actually in the process of doing that with my server! Thanks for the tip!

nodsocket,

Thanks for posting this, this is really critical advice for anyone who has important files. Everything from malware to floods to mistakes can destroy data.

_MoveSwiftly,

Could you please add a "Why YSK:"? It's rule #2. Thank you. :)

npastaSyn,

Done. I wonder if you can have a template to auto-populate.

_MoveSwiftly,

We'll need to work on it.

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