You ready for your house to burn down? Hi, everyone.
Leo Notenboom here for Askleo.com.
This is not a pleasant topic, but it's something that I think that is
very important for you to at least understand and potentially prepare for.
I'm not saying your house is going to burn
down, but there are a number of catastrophes that can happen
that could render your house and everything in it gone.
Here's the thing.
Hopefully by now you're backing up.
You're backing up regularly.
You've got everything covered so
that should something happen to your computer, you could just buy a new
computer, restore from your backup and get on with your life.
That's great.
Chances are you're backing up
to an external hard drive that probably sits right next to your computer.
I know mine does.
Like I said, that's great.
Honestly, it puts you way ahead of a whole
bunch of people that I unfortunately hear from too regularly.
Here's the thing.
That backup is great, but it's not really enough.
Here's the scenario.
You need to back that information up somewhere else as well.
Like I said when I started, it is possible for things to go wrong
in such a way that all of the technology in your house is gone.
That can be a fire.
In fact, I've had this happen personally
to relatives where a fire has taken all their precious memories with it.
It can be theft.
It can be water damage.
It can be power damage.
It can be so many other things
that basically would render your computer and your backups useless.
So the solution, of course, is what's called an off site backup,
backing up important information to some other location.
Now, years ago, one of the ways I did this
for myself was when my wife had a retail store.
I, of course, was the IT manager for the store.
But one of the things I did was I bought
two identical external drives, put one here at home and one at the store.
Each of the computers in those locations would back up to those external drives.
Then every once in a while, I'd swap the drives.
That way,
everything that was backed up at home was now off site at the store,
and everything that had been backed up at the store was now off site here at home.
Now, the good news is you don't really have to do that.
That's a good solution.
Don't get me wrong, if that's something that appeals to you, go for it.
But you don't necessarily have to do that
because online services like One Drive and Dropbox and Google Drive and so many
others are perfect for this off site backup.
They are by definition, off site.
They're on the services servers and who knows where they are.
They're certainly not in your house.
So if something happens to you,
your equipment, everything on the online service is still there.
Granted, it's not appropriate for full image backups of your computer.
It simply takes too long to upload those things to the online services.
But it's great for your data,
the important stuff, the stuff that you can't replace in any other way.
Consider that.
Consider using a service like One Drive or Dropbox or Google Drive or like I said,
any of a bunch of others to make sure that your most important
information is backed up, copied somewhere else to the cloud.
Now, one of the interesting things about backing up is that there's a really neat
rule of thumb that I think would make sense to at least understand.
And that is simply this, greater distance means greater protection.
For example, if you make a backup copy of a file you're
working on and save it to the same hard drive, maybe you just call it.
Back or you have some other something else that basically lets you have two copies
of the same file, but they're on the same hard disk.
Well, that's good.
That saves you from accidentally deleting the first file, the original.
It saves you from any typos you might make.
You could just recover from that backup copy.
But that's about all it saves you from, right?
If the hard disk dies, if the computer dies, both copies are gone.
So a backup copy on a separate internal
drive, which I know some people do, protects you from a little bit more.
Because now, if your original drive dies, well, you've got this second drive,
this internal drive that also has a copy of your data.
But it doesn't protect you from some other things.
So we go to an external drive a little further away from the original location.
What that protects you from is problems with your computer,
a problem in your computer that potentially could take out both
of your internal drives if you've got two of them.
It could be malware.
It could be a power surge that takes everything out.
Your data is safe there in the external drive.
But there are some things that that still doesn't really protect you from.
A backup copy on another machine on your local network, that's good.
That's something that then protects you from a little bit more.
It means that if, for example, malware reached out not only to your
machine but also to your external drive, well, it may not reach out to other
machines on your network, and therefore your data remains safe elsewhere.
Again, a little further away.
Finally, like I said,
a backup copy stored online somewhere is the furthest distance that we really have.
It is a far away from your computer, from the original location,
and protects you not only from computer failure, malware, that thing,
but it actually protects you from complete equipment loss at your original location.
Consider it, especially for the most important things you have.
In my case, that typically boils down to,
you know, some of the documents I work on, yeah, they're important.
What matters most?
My photographs.
I have a terabyte of photographs and they are stored on my machine,
on another machine in the basement, and in Dropbox in the Cloud.
So no matter what happens, those won't get lost.
Hope this is helpful.
I hope this gives you some things to think about for your own backup strategy
and making sure that you are protected from as much as you possibly can be.
For updates, for comments,
for links related to this topic and more, visit
askleo.com/2365.
I'm Leo Notenboom.
This is Askleo.com.
Thanks for watching.