Week 17: Protect Your Data

This week's task:  Make and implement a plan to back up your data.

Many of us have important stuff stored electronically...especially in the form of digital photos and videos.  Your data could be damaged or lost due to fire, theft, a lost device, hard drive failure, or flood. Is your data backed up?  Are you going to be worrying about grabbing your computer when you should be focusing on getting yourself and your family out of a dangerous situation?

Things to consider:

1. How painful would it be to lose everything on my computer/smartphone/tablet?
2. How much data do you need to back up?
3. How much are you willing to pay for a backup solution?
4. Are you comfortable storing personal data online (i.e. encrypted and password protected, but in a remote location on a company's servers)?
5. Will you consistently take action to back up your data or do you need your backup system to run completely automatically?

If you care about protecting your data, there are two main ways to do it: (1) Back up to an external hard drive or (2) Online backup (i.e. securely back up your files to a company's servers located somewhere other than your house).

External Hard Drive:

Advantages:

• One-time expense: You can get a high-quality 1-terabyte external usb drive for less than $100.  This harddrive  allows wireless backups across your home network.
• You retain physical control of your data...it isn't stored on a company's servers.

Disadvantages of backing up to an external drive:

• If you have a small amount of data to back up (less than 5 gigabytes), you can get online storage for free.
• If you store the hard drive at home, you could lose your backed up data in addition to your computer in the event of fire/theft/flood. 
• If you keep your hard drive stored somewhere offsite, then you have to concoct a complicated plan of bringing it back for regular backups or using a rotating system with two hard drives. Unless you are unusually diligent about this, you will probably go for long periods without backing up your most recent data to the offsite hard drive. 

Online Backup/Cloud-based Storage (storing your data "in the cloud"):

Online (cloud-based) backup services store your data on the company's servers at some undisclosed location in the world.  If your data is backed up with one of these services and your computer explodes tomorrow, you can buy a new computer and download all of your files in a couple easy steps.  To use online storage, you sign up for a service, download some software to your computer, tell it which folders you want to have backed up (or put everything you want backed up into a special folder), and you're done.  After that, anything you add to the designated back-up folders will be automatically backed up.  Note that you can only access your data that is stored online using a login name and password - it is not accessible publicly.

There are a lot of cloud-based services out there.  For the last few years, I've used Dropbox.  If you have less than 2 GB of data, it's free. Otherwise it is $10/month to back up a terabyte of data.  (That's 1000 gigabytes.)  You can access your data from any of your computers or mobile devices, it backs up everything you add automatically, and you can even make your phone/ipad back up the pictures and videos that you take automatically.

Advantages of cloud-based storage:

• Automatically backs up all new files or changes to existing files to an offsite location, safe from fire/flood/physical theft.  
• Many back-up services integrate very well with mobile devices so that you don't have to deal with backing them up separately.  

Disadvantages of cloud-based storage:

• The ongoing monthly charge (if you need to back up more than a small amount of data) will likely be more expensive over time than an external hard drive.
• Your data is stored on remote servers and if you worry about hackers, this might cause you anxiety.  (Note that your data is not publicly available - it can only be accessed by you using a login name and password.  Also, the probability of losing your data to hackers is probably much, much smaller than the probability of losing it some other way because you don't have it backed up.)