Steve Dotto here.
How the heck are you doing this fine day?
Me?
I'm feeling particularly responsible today because today on Ask DottoTech, the show where
you ask and I answer questions, the question is about backing up your computer.
Be it Windows or Mac, we are going to be ultra-responsible today on DottoTech.
Not too long ago on Ask DottoTech, I talked about a new ransomware which was attacking
the Mac community.
It has been around for a while in the Windows community but it spawned a flurry of questions
about backing up your computer.
Case in point from MrLuigiProductions who says, “Referring to your recent video on
ransomware, would you consider addressing how to best create a full backup of one’s
Mac operating system and all?
I use Time Machine and I know it doesn’t make a clone of your drive.
Would this be a problem if your Mac was hijacked by a ransomware like virus?
Thanks and top of the day to you.”
I should have done the whole thing in an Irish accent, I suppose.
MrLuigiProductions, you are absolutely correct, sir.
Time Machine is an awesome backup.
What it does is it does incremental backups where you can actually go back at some date
stamp in time and recover the files as they were.
Great for creative types who might be working on different projects and might want an earlier
version but not fantastic for disaster recovery because you have to restore a drive after
you’ve reinstalled an operating system.
Instead what we want to do, at least what I would like to do, is to be able to clone
a drive so that if I had a massive system failure with one of my drives, I could then
just plug the new drive in and be back and operating within minutes, not hours or days
as is with most other systems.
So this is a great place to start our dialogue about our strategy for backing up.
Now just backing up your computer is not enough.
You need to have a strategy of where and when you back up.
So there are two factors here.
The first is the importance of actually backing up.
My good friend and sometimes business partner Brooks Duncan likes to say in all of the webinars
we do that there are only two type of drives in the world, those which have failed and
those which will fail.
At some point, every hard drive is going to fail so it’s how we respond to those failures
that defines how good our backup system is.
So both Brooks and I like to have a multi-pronged strategy in backing up our computers.
We want to have a local backup, we want to have an online backup and we want to have
a remote backup, each serving different purposes.
We’re going to go through all of those today for both Windows and Mac and it won’t take
too long.
Let us begin with the local backup.
Now the local backup I think should be a clone backup.
It should be where we’ve cloned our hard drive.
As a matter of fact in the Windows world, you won’t be cloning typically speaking.
You’ll be doing a straightforward backup.
But in the Mac world, we have the unique opportunity of being able to create essentially a bootable
drive all the time because of the way Mac architecture works.
It’s easy for us to just plug a USB drive in and then boot from that new drive.
The Mac makes it very easy.
Hence a tool like Carbon Copy Cloner becomes an invaluable tool for Mac users.
This allows us to be able to easily mirror the drive that we are working on.
This is a great local strategy.
Let’s take a look at Carbon Copy Cloner.
Look at it.
This is so easy.
When you first install it, you’re going to see this screen and it is so simple.
You select a source drive.
This is the drive you want to back up.
What drive do I want to back up?
My OS drive that has all of my preferences, all of my operating system, all of that built
in.
All of my applications are here on this drive.
Not all of my data.
I’ll talk about that in a moment.
This will allow me to boot and be into my system almost instantly.
Then you select the destination.
This is a three-step process.
It’s so easy.
The destination drive is the drive you want to back up on.
I'm going to set this up to back up on my storage drive.
Now I've got a system set up here with the Mac Pro, which has multiple drive bays so
I can have a USB drive plugged in or I can use an internal drive.
“Ah!”
you’re saying, “But what happens if somebody steals your computer?”
Well, if it’s a local disaster where things have just exploded here with my drive, a fire,
theft or something along that line then I'm going to have to use one of my other online
systems for restoring my system.
But if just my boot drive fails, I can, using this system, be up and operating again in
moments because I've got a backup of that drive always ready to go here with my storage
drive.
Then the third part of the equation is how often to do it.
You can do it as often as you want.
Let’s do it on a daily basis.
You set it up on a daily basis and then you can ask to be sent an email if it’s done
or if there are any errors just so you’re given some extra notification.
It’s just that easy to set up a clone backup of your system.
You can do this with a plug-in USB drive.
Heck, you can do it with a big enough thumb drive if you had a massive thumb drive.
So you’ve got lots of different options of ways to do this backup.
The key is to do it.
Now this is ideal for instantly, quickly getting back up and running.
But it doesn’t back up all of your data unless all of your data happens to be on that
hard drive and it doesn’t back up all your photos and other things.
Let’s talk about the strategy for that.
With my drive, because I use a solid state drive, I don’t keep all of my documents,
all of my photos and all of my videos on that drive.
They all live on other drives which I have other backup strategies for.
Not quite as crucial but nevertheless I basically can do the exact same thing.
I can take each one of these drives here using Carbon Copy Cloner and back them up to another
great way, which is a great way to do things as well.
But the bottom line is now I've got a good set-up for local backup.
Before I leave the local backup question, let’s take a look in the Windows world and
see how we can do the same kind of thing in the Windows world.
In here, I've got Windows 10 running.
In Windows, you go into the Settings.
It’s pretty simple.
It’s pretty straightforward.
Just go into the Updates and then you’ve got a little backup tool.
I see no reason to use anything other than the Windows backup tool.
Now Windows doesn’t react quite as well to having a new drive just plugged in and
being able to boot from it.
So you kind of do things the old school way where instead you back up your files and you
back up your key documents and settings.
You do that all here.
I can’t actually show you setting up a drive because I'm running a virtual installation
of Windows and none of my drives are formatted for Windows so it’s not recognizing any
of the drives.
But as soon as you click here on Add a Drive on your Windows system, all of your available
storage will come up and you can determine which drive you want to back up on.
It’s a very straightforward process.
Again determine what documents, what settings, what applications you want to back up and
that gives you the best options to restore from Windows as well.
Now having said this, this is where at this point here the rest of our strategy as far
as I'm concerned in both Windows and Mac because now we’ve gone from basically instantly
getting back online in our local environment to what we can do in the cloud.
The tools like Dropbox, Google Drive and One Drive create a tremendous opportunity for
us to back up as well because we basically have shared drive space online in the cloud
that’s available to us at all times.
Now typically speaking, I would not say that cloud storage is your best overall backup
solution but I think it can be a nice part of the solution and here is how I make that
work.
For my Documents folder, for all of my word processing documents, my spreadsheets, etc.,
I take all of those and I copy them into either Google Drive or into Dropbox or One Drive.
I copy them onto a cloud storage system.
Now the files are fairly small so they don’t take up all that space but now they’re being
cloned, they’re being mirrored to that system.
I would do the same say with my backup of my Evernote notes.
All of that sort of information, I will back up and I will have a copy that’s living
in Dropbox.
So if I have to rebuild my system, all of my documents are available to me in Dropbox
as well.
I think it’s great for that.
It’s not necessarily great for backing your entire system up but it is great for your
documents.
But what about photos?
At the end of the day, I think your photos are the most valuable single asset on your
computer.
It’s the only thing that I can’t think of doing without.
So for photos, you have to look for good online mirroring and backup system as well.
Now I personally like Google Photos.
Google Photos works tremendously well for everything, unless you’re going to be storing
all your photos in camera raw, in very, very high resolution.
But for even the normal high def photos that we take with our digital cameras or with our
smartphone, Google Photos works great for that.
So all you do is make sure that you’re constantly mirroring your systems to Google Photos and
you’ve always got a backup.
So if something goes south with any of your systems, they get stolen, lost, broken or
whatever, you’ve always got the backup available to you at Google.
Now smart people will also have a hard drive backup.
They might be backing up their photos folder the way that we were showing with local backup
as well.
I have no issues at all with that.
In fact, I encourage you.
The more backups, the merrier.
But this is the case here with your documents and with your photos where I do believe online
storage, the online systems, the cloud storage systems will work very well for you.
Now that brings us to the last part of the equation, which is off-site backup of your
full system.
Everything we’ve talked about right now is fine if our computer crashes and we have
access to the hardware still and we can get online ourselves from our local location.
We haven’t lost everything.
We haven’t lost our computer.
But happens if you do have that local disaster, a fire, a flood or theft?
At that particular point, it’s great to have off-site storage as well where you can
go and you can download your entire system, all of your documents, everything, from an
online service.
There’s a variety of them.
I've got a bunch of them here.
I've got one called Backblaze which is very popular that a lot of people like to use,
another called Carbonite and all of these work very similarly both for small businesses,
even large business, and personal.
They start and they do a persistent online backup where you’re constantly backing up
your data to an online service.
The one that I like is one called iDrive.
I like it for a couple of reasons.
I've been using it for many years and I actually—full disclosure—have an affiliate relationship
with them.
So if you click on my link for iDrive and you choose to buy it, Steve gets a little
bit of money.
But the bottom line with iDrive is as well as doing all of your online backup for both
personal and small businesses, they have a unique service where if you do have a complete
disaster and you have to rebuild your system, you might have multiple gigabytes of data
that you have to restore, restoring that over the internet is a pain in the rump.
So what iDrive does is they create a backup disk that they ship to you so you can restore
from a hard drive.
Much faster, much more efficient.
All of these products are priced about the same.
They all seem to have about the same reliability.
They’ve all got clients from Windows, Mac, your smartphones and for all of your different
devices.
They’ve all got family plans.
So they all kind of fall under the same umbrella as far as the value they offer.
It’s just choosing the one that you feel most comfortable with, that you like the interface
of and that you feel will serve your needs.
For me, iDrive is the product that I choose.
So you need to come up with a strategy that is sort of like mine.
Local backup with fast recovery based on a hardware failure is number one.
Number two is cloud storage of your most important data like your documents and your photos so
that you can gain access to them if there’s a local or a major problem and that you’ve
got the redundancy of backup plus the convenience of being able to access them from a browser
at any point when you’re traveling or anything like that.
So cloud storage is the number two part of your backup solution.
Number three is full off-site backup for major disasters if you have to recover.
Each of these will cost you a little bit of money but the bottom line is if you follow
a program that gives you all three levels of security, you’re going to be backed up.
Your information is going to be available to you when you need it and when disaster
happens, you are going to look like a superstar because you were prepared.
I hope you found today’s video to be useful.
Now the Ask DottoTech show is where you ask questions and I answer them.
I’d love to hear your comments on ideas around your backup system, if you’re following
this and if you’ve had some great disaster recovery stories, please share them with us
in the comments.
It’s encouraging for us to hear when success happens.
If you’ve got disaster stories, maybe you want to share those, too, as kind of a call
to action for everybody else but mostly, I want to hear good stories.
Please, please, happy stories would be nice.
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Till next time, I am Steve Dotto.
Have fun storming the castle!