A Modern Backup Strategy for Families
If you don’t back up, you should. This post will help you understand what makes up a successful backup strategy. [blog.mindrocketnow.com]
My eldest recently told me, in an embarrassed voice, that she never backs anything up. All of her stuff is on her phone and tablet, so if either breaks, she’ll lose something, perhaps something important. I realised that the backup strategy that I’ve successfully implemented for myself isn’t fit for purpose for a busy family. This is the new, shiny strategy that I’m putting in place, and I hope it’ll give you some ideas for your own strategy.
You need a backup for your whole life
Some things that aren’t currently backed up really need to be, and yet not everything needs to be backed up.
Most of my family’s transactions with the outside world is online, at least in part. This means things that were purely physical now are either mostly or totally online. As our digital footprint increases, so does the scope of things that could be backed up. This is a short list of data that has recently crossed from analogue to digital:
All media (photos, music, books, films)
Recipes
Passwords
Credit cards
Share certificates
Strava run log
Passports
Health data (blood pressure, ECG scans)
Chats with friends
Yet not every single thing needs to be backed up, and just to make it a little more complicated, not everyone needs to back the same things up. For example, my wife doesn’t feel the need to back up her business tweets. I do. We place a different value on the very same data set. Our backup strategy takes account of this.
However, backing up costs, in both money and effort. How do you determine what makes sense to back up? Here are 3 rules to help you decide:
After you create that post, that file, the piece of data will you need to refer back to it next month? If the answer is “yes” or “don’t know”, make an online backup.
Will it take more time and effort to recreate that data from scratch, than to recover from your backup? If the answer is “no” then go ahead and make that online backup. It’ll take us half an eternity to to reinstall and recreate all the app data that’s on our phones, so that makes it a prime candidate for backing up.
Don’t back up online data into physical. If you’re happy with your online recipe service, and have everything you need online, don’t buy another recipe book. If you have a password manager, you really need a password manager, don’t write them down at the back of your diary. Only make an exception if that physical thing itself gives you joy - if that recipe book is an interesting coffee table book, if that online photo deserves a framed print, if that album has a limited vinyl edition.
So your first task should be to write down a list of all the things to back up, per person in the household. Then go through the list and look out for two things:
Do I want to reuse this data item in the future? Repeatedly? Then spend some time now to turn it into an asset that needs zero effort to be reused in the future. For example, ripping a CD (if it’s not available on a streaming service) or writing a “lessons learnt” style white paper.
Will this data item take a disproportionate amount of effort to back up? Then you might as well be realistic and cross these off the list because they won’t get done. All those baby photos not yet in frames are priceless, but won’t get backed up unless you prioritise the time to scan them all in.
Have a backup strategy, not just a single backup
If it’s important enough to be backed up online, then it’s important enough to be securely backed up online.
I signed up for a Dropbox account when it launched in 2009. I’ve now got cloud accounts with Dropbox, Google, Apple, Microsoft and Box, as well as Amazon AWS and IBM cloud business storage. That’s a lot of cloud storage, and it’s a headache to manage effectively. Moreover by themselves, none of them make a backup strategy.
A backup strategy needs to be:
Frictionless: seamless in your everyday tech life;
Secure: only allow you to access, or give you tools to manage secure sharing;
Cost-effective: I don’t want yet another monthly subscription, for something that I hope I don’t have to use.
So my backup strategy makes use of 3 policies using different tiers of storage:
Real-time for up-to-date online copies: All files that are regularly used are in folders that sync to the cloud. Nothing is solely on my computer’s (or phone’s) storage. This gives me the convenience of having everything whenever and however I want it, available if anything goes wrong with my hard drive, and also gives me tools to securely share with others.
Dropbox is used for work files (currently 8GB).
Google Drive is for family files (currently 17GB).
Apple iCloud is for backing up devices because we’re an Apple family. This is also the only one I pay for, as we back up all 12 of our Apple devices, which means we need the 200Gb tier.
Microsoft OneDrive is for the Xbox and OneNote because neither integrate with anything else (currently 5GB).
Box is used for random stuff that I don’t want to manage. It’s the least used, and the one I could just delete without noticing (currently 50GB).
So that’s about 280GB of cloud storage for £2.49 per month, and it’s much more than enough. The biggest data hogs are the Apple device backups, which is why I pay for iCloud. If you choose not to back up your devices, then you could probably get away with not paying a penny for enough cloud storage. Regardless, I wouldn’t recommend having this many cloud accounts, as I have to remember my internal rules for which files are where. Thankfully, all these cloud services integrate well with my various devices, so I can search across them. Try to stick with one service, if you can - my recommendation is Google Drive (Google One for paid additional storage).
The honorable exceptions are for my media files and disk images. I have so much of them (about 6TB) that cloud storage is too expensive, and they don’t change so they needn’t be backed up. So they’re in a Drobo NAS in my home (see tier 3 Archiving). The irony, of course, is that thanks to Spotify, Kindle and Netflix, we don’t use these media files anyway.
Near real-time for recent online copies: This is where the automatic backups are made. As an Apple family, we use Time Machine, and it’s a brilliant piece of software. It automatically uses system downtime to create a compressed backup of the computers (but not yet phones and tablets - those are backed up to iCloud). Its brilliance comes from the fact that you can search for files backwards in time as well as across your folders, from the same Spotlight UI, making recovery easy.
My backup location for Time Machine is on a Drobo NAS in the house. This is a RAID6 array, and supports hot-swapping hard drives of differing sizes. It’s around 10 years old now, but the technology is intrinsically quite reliable, so it’s still going strong. However, if you don’t already have one, I don’t recommend spending on a rock solid RAID6 NAS like I did. If the Drobo ever dies, I’ll send Time Machine to the cloud as 2TB iCloud costs £6.99 which is just about half the cost of owning a NAS for 3 years. To me, there’s no longer any economic reason to back up to equipment that I have to buy and maintain.
Archive for older offline copies: Archiving is very different to backing up, and is the essentially the opposite of my Near Real-Time policy. I don’t back up my cloud drive; Time Machine is set to exclude these folders. Instead, I periodically copy those cloud-synced folders to my Archive directory in my Drobo. This way, there is a copy of all of my files that isn’t linked to the cloud. If I accidentally delete a file from Google Drive that I want again, I won’t be able to find it online, but I will be able to find it in my Drobo archive.
Archiving is not just a backup of your backups, it’s also for other file types that you shouldn’t be backing up in the first place. The key criteria is that these files should not change. Archiving is good for:
All media (photos, music, books, films)
Last working version of software and OS
Full disk images
Unlike tier 2 backups, I recommend that you keep them on USB drives rather than in the cloud. Do a full archive once per year on a USB drive, copy it onto a second drive, and put them both in an airtight container somewhere. There’s no need to buy an expensive NAS for this (as I’m doing), just buy inexpensive external drives. (And don’t bother reusing old ones, buy a couple of new drives every year.) Spin them up once a year just to make sure they still boot and can be read from your computer. This will give you an inexpensive archive that is physically secure.
Some final thoughts
From bitter experience...
You should back up thoughtlessly. If you need to think about backing up your stuff, if it’s not automatic, there’s a danger it won’t get done, and won’t be there when you really need it. We use Time Machine, because… Apple. There are plenty of other solutions out there, mostly for free. Use the one that fits with your workflow with zero maintenance.
A backup is useless if you can’t find anything. Searching is a panacea, but only works if your backup is properly indexed, versioned and regularly maintained (= checked that it can be restored). That’s why it’s worth paying for backup software. However, if you find yourself searching through your backups regularly (and if you search your archive at all), then it’s a sign that you’ve confused your storage tiers. Remember: files that you use often should be in tier 1 cloud storage, back ups that you restore from infrequently should be in tier 2 cloud storage, and archives that you don’t search at all should be in tier 3 USB drives.
Recently, I found my old CD backups (remember those days?) from when I first started working. For a fleeting moment, I thought about firing them up and extracting the files that I might now need, before I remembered that very old backups are dangerous. Even if the data doesn’t degrade physically (electromagnetically), it will degrade in value. Those project files that were important to retain just in case, become irrelevant as context inexorably changes over time. Knowledge is hard to back up. Unless you’ve taken the time to create reusable assets, such as lessons learnt, then adapting an old file to a new context will take longer than creating something afresh. Restoring from a very old disk image will very likely fail, as the drivers will be out of date, so keeping them gives a false sense of security.
Lastly: don’t back up when you need to - it’ll be too late by then. Instead, back up now.
Let me know how you’ve implemented your backup strategy in the comments.
