The things I over-think! How difficult is to store your digital files: photos, books, music, movies and documents?
In the old days we put books on shelves or in boxes; photographs in albums, or in boxes; records and CDs on shelves, or in boxes; and any documents we generated in files, or in boxes. How easy was that? Then computers came along and made everything simpler by making it more complicated. Everything was stored on the hard drive - passing over the days of floppy drives and diskettes - but what happened if the hard drive packed up? Hence backup which meant taking a copy of everything on another disk and storing that somewhere safe. Real Men did backups daily, weekly, and monthly. The daily and weekly ones were cycled, the monthly ones kept forever. On tape. Lots of people didn’t do backups, and every now and then they wrote to Jack Schofield at the Guardian about the disaster, and Uncle Jack scolded them lightly.
Backup is copies you make on a storage device and then leave alone unless disaster strikes, when you copy them back to wherever you copied them from. You never edit backup copies. Ever. You should keep at least two generations of backups.
Cloud drives in particular and synching services in general, are not backup. Do something dumb on one synched device, like delete everything, and all the other synched devices will lose everything as well. iCloud, One Drive, Google Drive and all the other services have this feature. To make up for it, some of them add a versioning, recovery or history feature that gets over this. When I tried using the versioning on Pages on my 4GB Mac Air, it choked so bad I had to turn it off.
A Cloud drive is what you use when you want to access, edit and save back your work-in-progress files from a number of different devices. Put your photos up in the iCloud and you can regale everyone with your holiday snaps on your iPhone, iPad, Macbook or even Windows device. Ditto music, though why you would when you can get it from a streaming service is another question. Unless it’s a recording of your band, or a track you’re working on. Same for videos.
Cloud drives offer you the assurance that even if your device gets lost, goes crazy or gets broken, you won’t lose your files, which will be there waiting for you to re-connect to them after you have bought a new device. But that’s not backup.
What to backup on? Storage is the physical medium on which you place the files. Internal hard drives, pen drives, external SSD’s, Network drives and NAS, cloud drives, tape, CD’s. You can also store files on a disk in some company’s cloud service, effectively renting a hard drive from them. You have to backup to a physically different device, which you should then keep somewhere else. (So if someone drops something on the computer, the backup is in another room.)
How to backup?
Both Apple and Microsoft offer a continuous backup service: Time Machine for Apple and File History for Windows 10. Setting these up requires an external drive that can be configured for Time Machine / File History: that’s not always a given. Note also that both those are complex pieces of software. If you take your Time Machine disk to someone else’s computer, good luck if that other computer is a Windows 7 device. Time Machine and File History are good insurance against something stupid happening to your files, but not against something stupid happening to your computer.
A good backup sits on a drive that any computer can read and copy from. Since every operating system can read Windows file system disks, put your backup on a NTFS drive, in other words, get an off-the-shelf external drive from Amazon, PC World or any other major retailer. I am not going to get involved in USB types at this point. Roughly, make sure the USB port on the drive looks like one of the USB ports on your computer. Or use a NAS, which plugs into the router so you connect over Wi-Fi.
How to get the files over? There are back-up programs available that have nice user interfaces, but there are also much simpler options. On Windows 10 (and any other version) look up the xcopy command. This is a thing of wonder. There seems to be an OS X version called rsync that does the same thing. Both these tools only copy new or updated files relative to the destination folder. So the first one is painful, but the following ones can be quite fast. At work I use a Powershell script to sync my local drive to a personal network drive at the end of each week, or whenever I’m taking the laptop to and from work.
What to backup? Your ‘data’ of course. You may want to backup the software you’ve downloaded (the files in your Download directory) so you can re-install it if need be: this may be sensible if the latest versions are not compatible with your machine or operating system (OS X users will understand).
So let’s take a work-in-progress document. It’s in my iCloud drive, and hence on my laptop, maybe another device, and on Apple’s servers. iCloud is a synching service, not a backup. So I need a backup in case I do something stupid on iCloud. The laptop drive is the first stop: I save from the iCloud drive to my Documents folder daily. I backup my Documents folder up to my NAS at least once a week. And I backup my NAS to an external drive every month, or straight after I add significant amounts of data to the NAS (by ripping a bunch of CDs). I have two external drives and rotate them.
A professional photographer, video-maker or musician may want to take archive copies of the original files before even thinking about importing to the editing software. In the future it will be those archives that scholars want, not the finished product, which will reflect the fashions of the moment.
Having reviewed all this, my shortcomings are not so bad. I’ve understood the correct role of cloud drives, and the limitation of the Time Machine / File History technology.
I need to backup my Mac Air Documents and Photos folders to the NAS more frequently than I do. I’ll do that with rsync. I need an external drive to backup my NAS, and I’ll do that with xcopy. I could do with tidying up the NAS and taking the plunge of doing a soft reset because I forgot its admin password (!).
(Later). I sorted out the NAS. The filesystem works fine, but the bit that runs diagnostic tests and sets up a Time Machine volume seems to have gone astray. Or it isn’t compatible with Catalina (I updated to Catalina after finding enough people who said it worked fine on their Early 2015 Air. It does.)
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