A Modern Backup Strategy for Families

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: 

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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:

1. 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.

2. 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:

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

5 Tested tips for remote working

How did your first week of working from home go? These are the tips that worked for me - let me know which ones work for you. [blog.mindrocketnow.com]  

In this time of global pandemic, most of us are being asked to work from home. Here in England, we’ve just finished our first week where the kids have been schooled at home, so the first week of all of us working from home at the same time. I was prepared for a disaster caused by overly overlapping personal space - but it seems to have worked out well (so far). Perhaps this is why:

1. Make sure your environment works

Near the top of my personal irritations is the consistent loss of the first 7.6 minutes of each meeting with “can you hear me?”. All too frequently, the meeting is abandoned entirely. Seeing as it took so long just to get the diaries aligned just to get this meeting slot, I inevitably fall back on email and slack messaging, with all the communication debt that incurs.

Much better is to set up your environment in advance. Start with the basics: are you sat at a desk in a room where the door closes? Do you have a good quality speaker or headset? Does your software recognise the webcam? Is your bandwidth high enough for all of the household to have conference calls (house parties) simultaneously? Have you taped shut the door of the microwave?

Do you have the right hardware? We went with iPads + bluetooth keyboards for the kids, and laptops + peripherals for the grown-ups, because that’s what we were all familiar with. Familiarity means self-troubleshooting and not yelling for Daddy for tech support.

Then there’s the software. Every participant in a call needs to use the same software, and have it installed ahead of time, then add the other participants to their app’s address book. Some free software has a limit on the number of participants in video conferences. Some free software defaults to open conferences that anyone can attend. Finally, and before your call, test your setup beforehand. 

Even after all your preparedness, the call will still lose time to people sounding like a Dalek, but at least it won’t be you.

2. Commit to a routine

The psychological cues that come from a routine give you a short-cut to productivity. That’s why uniforms exist, and why you only seem to start thinking whilst lacing your shoes. It’s why the evening commute helps to bookend the day, to mentally check out. We found that we needed to replace the normal physical cues with other physical cues. And when we didn’t, the morning seemed to evaporate without anything productive to show for it. My ideal morning routine consists of setting out my daily intention, meditating for 15min, and doing some light physio for another 15min.

Speaking of mornings, it’s true for most of us that this is peak productivity time, so attack your most difficult or intricate work items then. However, you probably still need a simple first task to work through the mental gears and get into the flow - which isn’t making another cup of coffee.

However, making a cup of coffee is important for a few reasons: for breaks, for hydration (though water is clearly better), and as a reward for your good behaviour. So make plenty of coffee (or better, red bush tea). Counter-intuitively, breaks to the routine support the routine. So at lunchtime, don’t feel guilty if you watch some Netflix. Make sure you go outside for your one walk of the day, and go every day, rain or shine - the change of scenery really is as good as a rest.

Clock out at the end of the day, as you would during the evening commute. We found sitting round the kitchen table for tea and cake, or watching an episode of The Simpsons together, or going for a walk, was a clear way to end the day, and removed the temptation to keep an eye on the email.

Finally, the weekend isn’t a reason for pausing the routine. We found we still need the morning physical cues, even if the day consists of different activities. When we didn’t, me and the eldest found ourselves sleeping the morning away.

3. If one person works remotely, everyone needs to behave remotely

BP (Before Pandemic), it was very easy for the single remote worker to feel left behind. Many decisions were made in the office kitchen, information was disseminated over email, status was shared verbally. Remote team members were filled in later. Team empathy was fostered by going to the pub afterwards, by those who happened to be in the office to be rousted. Now everyone is a remote worker, the playing field is levelled, and everyone has to try harder.

Everyone logs into video calls, so everyone should adhere to VC etiquette: test your kit before the call; latency means don’t interrupt; being a small face in a grid means making bigger gestures; presentations need to use bigger fonts; showing the background of your home office tells people about the non-work you. And always share video, it’s so much more effective than audio only.

Working across time zones is hard. In my previous job, I had to schedule calls with folks from Buenos Aires, Singapore and London, and it was always the Singaporeans who seemed to need to work late. Companies like Trello institutionalise common working hours of 12-4 PM EST regardless of your actual location. But for the majority of the time, you’ll be working asynchronously, so your communications needs to support that.

I found that the quality of knowledge sharing is really put to the test in remote working. Knowledge needs to be searchable rather than gained by knowing the right Slack channel or the right person to ask; it takes too long to absorb collective memory verbally. Knowledge should be openly shared, rather than restricted in an email distribution list. Decisions should be archived effectively, not hidden in status reports. 

All communications are now digital, so there’s no reason not to include everyone. But rather than broadcasting to everyone just in case (= spam), it should be the responsibility of the remote worker to subscribe to the right channels, to not be left behind by omission. It’s also the responsibility of remote workers to remain current; skim all the channels, read the status decks, attend the stand-ups, schedule 1:1 calls with managers and peers.

Digital tools make presence much easier. It’s now trivial to signal whether you’re open to informal contacts, open to meetings, or blocked for focus time, or blocked because you’re not working. On the other hand, digital tools make it easier to flood communications, so it’s important to choose the right tool when giving and organise when receiving.

4. Over-communicate

You’ll doubtless read about the importance of over-communicating, that if you think you are over-communicating, you’re probably only doing the right amount. We found aspects of over-communicating to be important, but to be treated with caution.

Our children are very clear about the difference between right-sized communication and over-communication. They like being set specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, time-bound school work, because it gives them the certainty of knowing when done = done. But they react badly to unfocused, unclear, repetitive communication = “boring”. They resent being asked for status as a proxy for justifying their time (which is why “how was your day?” yields a monosyllabic “fine”), but are very happy to share status when it’s truly sharing (which is why our game of “tell me just one thing” works well at the dinner table).

Over-communication amplifies the difficulties with digital tools. Non-verbal cues are missing in most digital means, so it’s important to assume positive intent both in giving and receiving. The digital cues are different; @all and @here shouldn’t be abused as they signal that what you have to say is important enough to interrupt everyone else’s train of thought/ dinner.

It seems to me that the secret of successful communication is to treat all adults like children, and all children like adults.

5. Hold yourself accountable

Personal productivity requires personal accountability. Unless you’re clear about what you will do in any one day, and more importantly what you won’t, then you’ll never be finished. Our children have timetables from their school to give them their structure. I prefer the GTD method to give me the boundaries to delineate work from home. Without it I find it too easy not to start my day because I don’t have a simple start-up task defined, and I find it too easy to continue thinking about my email when I should be listening to a family member.

Unless you hold yourself accountable and are proactive, you will be left behind. People won’t reach out to you if they don’t know you’re there. So I’ve learnt to make a little noise: ask questions in the work topic Slack channels, and contribute nonsense and gifs in the social channels.

Holding yourself accountable is the difference between receiving direction and choosing direction. For my children it’s the difference between disliking a subject because they’re not receiving teaching that they get on with, and liking a subject because they’re learning for themselves.

Bonus: 3 things not to do.

Of course things have gone wrong this week, and this is generally because the same challenges to team dynamics in the office apply to remote working.

It seems to be harder to create an environment of psychological safety when working remotely. To create this safe space, to create team empathy, don’t be all about work. Find a space (perhaps in the 7.6min of “hello, can you hear me?” at the beginning of each call) to share geographical, cultural and personal contexts. Be interested in other people. And watch out for your unconscious biases - if there’s someone who’s habitually not “on the same page” as you, think about why. My wife has virtual office drinks at 5pm on Friday (neatly circumnavigating the no booze in the workplace rule) which strikes me as an excellent idea.

Don’t try and multi-task. Just because your computer screen can show two things simultaneously, doesn’t mean you can surf the web whilst on that conference call. You can’t do useful office work if you have to babysit your toddlers. You can’t do more than triaging your email whilst waiting on hold to the doctor’s surgery. Be present and engaged when you work, because this will give you the head space to be present and engaged when you’re not working.

And because things never go according to plan, don’t be too hard on yourself if you need to change. Go with it. The rewards are well worth it.

The great health data giveaway.

I’ve started running. To get over the shock, I've decided to do data-driven running, to quantify my improvements. But health gadget vendors aren't making it easy. Blog.mindrocketnow.com 

Data-driven running is a great motivator. I'm in competition with me, and I know that I can beat me. Better yet, I don't feel bad losing to me. This competition is whole lot more healthy (in all senses) than with my wife (who can out-fit me every time).  

I measure time, pace, distance, heart rate. Trouble is, due to the product choices that I've made, I have 3 separate devices. Each device has its own service, and none integrate with another. My heart rate monitor is through my Jabra elite sport ear buds (incidentally, a great product because of the in-ear coaching) with the data viewable in its iPhone app. I also use the HRM in my Nokia smart watch since it is collated with my other personal metrics (weight, body composition, blood pressure, steps, sleep) via Nokia Health app to give a more comprehensive picture of me. Post-run analysis (if you don't post it, it didn't happen) is from the Strava app on the iPhone. Finally, the data is archived in the Apple health app. So that's 3 devices and 4 apps. 

The value is in combining this information, then analysing to show actionable trends. If my muscle percentage is decreasing, I should increase my weights intensity. If the training effect of my runs are decreasing, I should attack more hills. So it's extremely frustrating that my data is in 3 closed ecosystems. Why deny me the ability to get best of breed devices and apps to work together?  

There's a deeper point. This is my data, and it's very personal data about me. Vendors are very welcome to provide me the tools to measure and analyse myself, but don't act as if you own my data. You should provide me the tools to manage my data without prejudice. Exporting, importing, integrating, and safeguarding data should be at the core of what you do. You don't own my data, because you don't own me. 

Anyone want a nearly new smart watch?