How to Protect Your Digital Files (Part 2)

This is Stever Robbins. Welcome to the Get-it-Done Guy’s Quick and Dirty Tips to Work Less and Do More. 

In Part 1 of this series on digital files you heard about my friend who lost seven years’ worth of MIT thesis work because they didn’t have good backups of their desktop machine. 

Having on-site backups is one way to recover when you have a fight with your thesis advisor, drag your thesis to the trash, and click Empty Trash thinking “That’ll show you, Stupid Advisor!!” Er, yeah. Deleting your thesis to get back at your advisor? N-i-i-i-ice.

But on-site backups still suffer from a problem. When a dimensional portal opens up by your computer and sucks your processor and backup drives into the Enchanted Forest, you lose everything. 

That’s why you need to open your own dimensional portal and store your backups there, too. Fortunately, we have such a portal. It’s called the Cloud. Cloud backup programs store your backups in off-site servers, where you can get to them even if your physical computer and disk drives become incapacitated.

But beware!

Although cloud backup providers paint a rosy picture of milk and honey when describing their services, they are far from perfect. Here are a few things to watch out for when storing in the cloud:

You Can’t Store it All

Storing terabytes of data in the cloud isn’t feasible. Unlike physical hard drives, data is slow to upload to the cloud (you try sending photos to an enchanted forest with all those weeds!). Plus many cloud backup services charge based on how much you store. 

For the cloud storage, decide explicitly what you’ll back up. You’ll almost certainly back up you Documents folder, and if you’re on a Mac, your ~/Library/Preferences/ folder as well.

Reliability Is Tricky 

You owe it to yourself (and your future survival) to understand the truth about the reliability of cloud resources. When you store backups at home, you’re vulnerable to dimensional portals. When you store backups in the cloud, you’re vulnerable to your provider’s data center having a dimensional portal. You’re vulnerable to a power loss between you and your provider. You’re vulnerable to a communications loss between you and your provider. 

And what if your data is hacked or encrypted and held for ransom? My local hospital recently lost all their medical records to a ransomware attack. I’m not supposed to know about it,...

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