bungeejumper wrote:Thanks guys, I'm glad I've stirred it up a bit.
![Laughing :lol:](./images/smilies/icon_lol.gif)
And that I'm not the only one to fret, and that some folk here have experienced the meltdowns that others say don't often happen. And that there are solutions to all this. You've reassured me. Thanks!
Your point is well taken - have a backup system in place.
![Very Happy :D](./images/smilies/icon_e_biggrin.gif)
My current backup is a portable USB HDD which gets updated whenever I remember to do it, which is about every three weeks, I guess. And an encrypted copy of whatever I'm currently working on, on the flash memory in my office drawer. (Shudder, cross my fingers.) I could do better, I know, with an internal HDD, which was my original point of entry about SATA connections.
So, thank you all again. But yeah, I'm a dinosaur and a non-techie, and I don't want to have to mess with registry settings and patch cables and stuff that won't work with Linux unless I re-sequence the discombobulator and adopt a multi-level access thingy and do a web search for every driver on my computer to make sure that it complies with the something-or-other protocol. Naah, I just want it to work, straight out of the box. That's one thing that Microsoft are reasonably good at. (They used to say the same thing about Apple. Do they still?)
And I still can't quite manage to trust the cloud with my most personal files. (Daughter had hers hacked, on an Apple.) But hey, I'm going off topic again. So what's new?
BJ
Ok, well, in order of your mentions, and all IMHO of course, "whenever I remember", indeed, anything that requires you to actually do something, just isn't good enough, an internal HDD won't protect you against your PC or house catching fire or some similar disaster, and your distrust of the cloud is a valid concern but unwarranted as a total one.
I've described what I do elsewhere but let me run through it here again. You may think it's overkill but better that than losing stuff!
Firstly, I keep all of my personal data "in the cloud" using Google Drive (15GB free) for stuff that I wouldn't care if it gets compromised and
http://www.Sync.com (5GB free) for stuff that I would. Sync provides what's called zero knowledge end to end encryption, which means that your files get encrypted on the fly by your PC as they upload, get stored that way at Sync.com, and get decrypted on the fly by your PC when they're downloaded. Only your PC(s) have the encryption keys, so not even Sync.com can decrypt them, so even if Sync gets hacked and your data is stolen it's still secure.
Keeping my personal stuff in the cloud with those systems has a number of advantages.
- First and foremost, it's off-site backup, so even if the house burns down and/or I lose all my other backups my data is saved and available to me.
- Secondly, it's totally automatic, whenever I create/edit a file it automatically gets synced up to the cloud storage, in very short order if I'm connected to the internet and as soon as I do connect if I'm not.
- Thirdly, both of those services provide deleted file recovery and versioning, meaning that they keep the versions of files synced up to them (both advertise 30 days worth, my experience is that it's usually a lot more). That means that if after a few hours or days of doing many edits to a file you decide you've just messed it up, you can just roll back to the last "good" version you had. Versioning also lets you recover from a ransomware attack.
- Fourthly, the syncing works across devices so, if, like me, you have a desktop and a laptop it means you can switch between the two. Anything created/edited on the desktop gets automatically upsynced to the cloud and straight away (if connected of course) downsynced to the laptop, and vice versa. So, after a brief moment, all of my personal files are on both, and, in fact, that means I have at any moment three copies of it all, one on each of the local drives of my PCs and one in the cloud. (I also have a select few files automatically upsynced to my Android phone.)
Setting up both is easy, the only change to your working habits needed is to move all of your folders & files into the Google Drive and Sync folders that they create on your local drive.
Secondly, both my desktop and laptop have scheduled automatic daily image & differential Macrium Reflect backups to a NAS drive on my LAN. I have a Buffalo LS220D, which was a cheap (£145 six years ago) and pretty basic one and I don't think is available any more but does the job. Mine has two 1TB HDDs in it which I configured as RAID 1, meaning that the two mirror each other. So, if one goes belly up (as indeed, one did about a year ago) everything is still on the other and the box keeps working off of the one, until you replace the duff one, at which point it mirrors the existing one to the new one and then carries on with the two as before. I keep two weeks worth of full system backups for each PC on the NAS drive.
As I said upthread, when the HDD and later the SSD on my laptop went belly up, after replacing each I simply restored the last backup from my NAS to the replacement drive, and then let Google Drive and Sync.com sync down the few things I'd changed in the hours since the backup.
And, as if that's all not enough ... I also have Windows File History backups of my personal data from both PCs to a USB flash drive stuck in the back of my router, on an it's easy, it's automatic, and you can't have too many backups basis.
![Wink ;)](./images/smilies/icon_e_wink.gif)
(It's also makes it quick and easy to restore a previous version of a file directly from Windows.)
And I have a 2TB USB HDD attached to the NAS which the NAS does automatic weekly backups of the backups on the NAS to(!), keeping three weeks worth. The purpose of that is to let me recover the whole PC(s) from a ransomware attack, as those generally lock up everything they can see from the infected PC, but that drive is set up to be read-only from the LAN so won't be affected.
Hope that's given you some food for thought at least, and I definitely encourage you to use cloud storage as an immediate and automatic backup system for your personal files, and to consider a method of full system backups.