It used to be said that something didn’t exist digitally unless you had two copies, a working copy and a backup copy. These days, I would say that something doesn’t exist digitally unless you have three copies. A working copy, a local backup and an offsite backup.

Image by: cc licensed flickr photo shared by ostrograd

Three? Why Three?

The whole reason behind having three backups is that you have one working copy. This is the copy that you work on and use for day-to-day use. The documents you work on, the pictures you look at, the music you listen to, or the videos you watch.

The second copy, ideally, is a copy that is backed up automatically to a separate physical drive. This is a copy of your working files so that you can quickly get them back if you have somehow lost them or suffered a drive failure. It has to be a separate drive to protect you from hard drive failures. If you you have a hundred copies of a file and they are all on the same drive, then you have lost them all when you loose the drive.

The third copy should also, again ideally, be an automated backup of the working files to some place offsite. Offsite, really? You want to make sure you have a copy of those precious photos away from your home because if your house were to burn down then you would loose both the working copies and the backups.

First Things First!

Let’s look at where to begin. If you are a Mac user then you already have one piece of the puzzle, Time Machine. If you are a Windows user then you will need to go and get a Mac first, seriously. I used to find Time Machine very finicky but I gave it another try when I upgraded to Snow Leopard. I have had no issues with it, which means, I have no problem recommending it now.

Time Machine Preferences

If you’re unfamiliar with Time Machine I would suggest that you read more about it on Apple’s website. Briefly, Time Machine is a piece of software built into OS X that makes incremental backups to a separate drive every hour. When you plug in an external drive for the first time, OS X will ask you if you want to use it as a Time Machine drive. This drive will have to be larger than the drive you are backing up since you are saving multiple revisions of a file plus files that you may have deleted. If you click on the “Use as Backup Disk” then OS X will format the disk and you’re ready to go. Time Machine also works over networked drives which is useful for notebook computers.

Just like that, you have the first stage of your backups underway. Time Machine will allow you to go back in time and retrieve a file that you may of accidentally deleted or has become corrupted. You can also retrieve a file that you may have over written or changed and forgot to make a copy of first. I backup the internal drive of my iMac to an external USB drive using Time Machine. This is a set it and forget it solution.

Carbon Copy Cloner

If you don’t want to use Time Machine then I would suggest looking at Carbon Copy Cloner. It will give you more finite controls and I would recommend it for a more advanced user. I have a 1TB external drive that I use Carbon Copy Cloner to backup. I backup this drive to an additional set of drives on a semi-regular basis. The 1TB drive is primarily a miscellaneous files drive which contains files that I don’t make regular changes to. I don’t do an automated backup of this drive since the drives that I backup the 1TB drive to aren’t always on. I manually run Carbon Copy Cloner to back up this backup about once a week or whenever I feel that I have made a lot of changes to the files on that drive.

Offsite

Now that we have duplicates of our local files we need to look at how to create an offsite backup. There are numerous services out there that will do this but I prefer Backblaze. This was the first service of its kind that I started using and I have never found a compelling reason to switch. The cost of this service is $US5 a month or $US50 a year.

Backblaze Preferences

Backblaze will backup your computer to their servers at a configurable interval, hourly by default. Backblaze will also do incremental backups of all external drives. So, just to be clear, it will backup the drive inside of my iMac plus my external 1TB drive for $50 per year! This is what is called a wise investment. This is also a set it and forget it solution.

It will not backup Time Machine drives and a few other file types. The first backup took me over a month to complete but after that only the changes are backed up which speeds up backup times. If you were to loose everything in a fire or a theft then you can also have your data shipped to you on USB drives. That way it won’t take a month to download all your files again.

Let’s Summarize

I have a local backup of the drive inside of my iMac being automatically backed up locally to an external drive, via Time Machine. My external 1TB drive is being backed up locally to another set of disks manually, via Carbon Copy Cloner. I use Backblaze to automatically backup the drive inside of my iMac and my external 1TB drive offsite.

This now means that I have three copies of my digital files, the working copy, a local backup and an offsite backup. I feel that this is the only way to ensure that I am covered from all angles. I am protected from local crashes or any other type of disaster which would result in the loss of both of my local copies.

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About the author

Matt
I'm Matt and I share how to build an internet presence through internet business, social marketing, lifestyle design and productivity tools. While here, read about me to learn my story or find out how you can hire me.

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5 Comments for Backup! Securing Your Digital Information

Nicolas Sauvage

If you use Dropbox with N computers, you have N+1 copies of your files (optionally with all previous versions of the files): one copy in each computer and one on their system (which is likely to be backed-up too).

So, why stop at 3?

Reply

Matt Hooper

I love Dropbox but I use it for short term storage of working files. I prefer Backblaze for a complete backup. I have almost half a terabyte on Backblaze for $50/yr. I can’t get that with Dropbox.

I never suggested stopping at three. It’s actually the opposite. I feel there should be at least three copies. So, I agree! Why stop at 3?

Thanks for the comments!

Reply