Just what is a backup anyway?
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So backing up is something that I talk about a lot.
If you've been following me for any amount
of time, you know that it's something that comes up frequently because I
consider it to be one of the most important things you can do to prevent
data loss or prevent other kinds of catastrophes.
That being said, what does it mean to be a backup?
What is a backup anyway?
It's something that we kind of take for granted that everybody knows.
But when it comes to technology,
when it comes to computers, there's something very specific about
a backup that I think it's important to understand and at least consider when
you're managing your data when you're dealing with your system.
The short version is that a backup is a copy.
That's it. It's a copy of your file,
it's a copy of your hard disk, it's a copy of your photograph.
It's a copy that is stored somewhere else.
Now there's a statement that I make
frequently that says if there's only one, it's not backed up.
Or put another way, if it's in only one place, it's not backed up.
Think of it this way.
If you were to take a picture using your phone and did nothing more than that,
if you lost your phone, you would lose your picture.
That's because there's only one copy of that photo on your phone.
Backing up would mean you would make another copy of that photo somewhere else.
Sure, having a second copy on the phone is
kind of sort of a backup, just like having a second copy of a file
on your computer is kind of sort of a backup.
But ideally you want that backup to be
somewhere else so that if you lose your phone or if your hard disk dies,
or if your computer gets stolen, you still have that data somewhere else.
So the problem, of course, is that it's very easy to overlook making this copy.
It's very easy to actually lose that photo
on your phone forever because a second copy somewhere else wasn't made.
Now I keep talking about somewhere else.
Where is somewhere else?
Where should somewhere else be?
I don't have a specific answer because it varies depending on what equipment you're
using, what your needs are, what your situation is, and so forth.
I will tell you this, though.
There is a great rule of thumb, and that's simply this.
The further away from the original
that that copy is, the more things that you're protected from.
For example, let's say you're working
in a word processor and you're working on a document, and you save it to disk.
You've got your first and only copy.
Now let's say you do a save as or you make
a second copy of that file, but you keep it on the same hard disk.
Okay. That's protected from a few things, right?
It means that if you were to accidentally
delete something or make changes that you eventually decide you really didn't want
and you wanted to go back, you're protected from mistakes.
Essentially, you're protected from something happening
to the contents of the document that you didn't intend.
You can always go back to that copy and start over,
but you're not really protected from, say, a hard disk failure,
which is something that I think everybody really needs to be protected from.
So that's why so many different backup
tools are focused on copying your data to a different drive.
I always recommend an external hard drive.
That way, if something happens to the hard drive in your computer,
which can happen and often happens without warning, you still have all of that data
and whatever else you chose to back up on the external drive so you won't lose it
when you lose your internal hard drive, that's great.
And in fact, I'd call that like an 80% to 90% solution.
If you were to do only one kind of backup
for your computer, for your files, for your data, whatever, that's great.
That's a wonderful start.
But it doesn't protect you from everything.
For example, it doesn't protect you from fire.
If your house were to burn down,
it's going to take your computer and your external hard disk at the same time.
Again, you were backed up,
but the backup went with the original when everything got destroyed.
That's why we start talking about things
like what's typically called off site backups.
Now, off site backups is a term that predates the cloud.
And what it would normally mean is doing something like copying things to a hard
disk and then taking that hard disk somewhere else.
A good example was years ago,
my wife had a retail store that was separate, of course, from our house.
What I did is I got two identical external
hard drives, and I had the computers in at home backing up to it,
and at the store backing up to that one every once in a while.
When I went into the shop, I'd swap the drives.
That way. Each location also had backups
at the other location, kind of sort of automatically.
Today, you've got this thing called the Cloud.
I know there's a lot of controversy about who do you trust?
Should you?
Is your Internet connection fast enough, all that kind of stuff?
I get it, but it's worthy of serious
consideration specifically because by definition, it's somewhere else.
It's offsite.
So, for example, if I'm working on a document and I save it
to my hard disk, I happen to save it, say, in my Dropbox folder,
then it automatically gets copied to the Dropbox servers.
That way, if my house Burns down, taking all of my equipment with it.
The file still exists in Dropbox online.
Now, there are multiple different kinds of solutions for that and like I said,
there are lots of different thoughts about how you should best go about doing that.
But the idea is that cloud storage be it
Dropbox OneDrive, Google's cloud, whatever,
they all represent a form of offsite storage which can represent an excellent
place to store backup copies of whatever you think is important.
Now, the last thing I wanted to address is a very common confusion and it's
a confusion that I fall into myself all the time.
It's my editor that ends up catching me
and that's simply this is it backup or back up one word or two?
Well, the answer is yes.
It's both backup as one word is a noun or an adjective.
A backup is a thing I have backup two words is a verb or an action.
It's what you do.
You back up your computer so to put them
both together, you create a backup by backing up
hope that helps clarify a little bit of the confusion and gives you a better
understanding of just what it means to have a backup.
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