It's World Backup Day - are you protected?

Shawn Knight

Posts: 15,284   +192
Staff member

Whether through hardware failure, malicious software, or theft, losing your data is never fun. Too often, we don’t think about it until after an incident has taken place, but it doesn’t have to be that way.

That’s the goal of World Backup Day – to think about (and create) backups before something happens. After all, it’s not a matter of if you’re going to experience data loss, but when.

Life is far less stressful if you’re able to simply recover everything from a backup and go about your day. Think of it like a financial emergency fund – a proper backup will turn a major crisis into a minor inconvenience.

World Backup Day was founded in 2011 by digital strategy and research consultant Ismail Judan after reading about a Reddit user that had lost their hard drive and wished someone had reminded them to back up. Judan saw it as a great way to raise awareness and thus, the “holiday” was born.

The backup solution that works best for you will vary depending on your needs but in general, there are two methods to consider: local backups involving an external hard drive and cloud / off-site solutions. Either option is better than doing nothing although you’ll be best served by using both as the odds of losing local and remote backups simultaneously are incredibly low.

So, what's your backup strategy? You do have one, right?

Permalink to story.

 
No parties, no days off and we're still waiting for a proper solution to back up the world. This holiday is a sham!
 
I mirror my laptop once a month.
My photography files are both on my laptop, my home computer, several DVD's, a mirror of
my home computer.
(yes, I'm paranoid with my photography)
 
All my files are on my Synology NAS in Raid 1 and continuously backed up to Onedrive. I also have a portable hdd which I backup to once a month in case of ransomware.
 
All my files are on my Synology NAS in Raid 1 and continuously backed up to Onedrive. I also have a portable hdd which I backup to once a month in case of ransomware.
You didn't include model, serial no's and capacity of your NAS. Just thought I'd point that out in case somebody here would be interested... ;)
 
Of course. Backup of my important data a cardinal rule to me. In fact I have duplicates of my backups and I do them regularly. I don't care about my OS's, apps or programs, if lost or corrupted, they can easily be reinstalled.
If I was ever stupid enough to be infected by something like ransomware, I wouldn't hesitate, even for a second, to reformat my machines. I'll never pay those perps a solitary penny.
 
Last edited:
You didn't include model, serial no's and capacity of your NAS. Just thought I'd point that out in case somebody here would be interested... ;)

IF someone was really that interested in me and any data I hold I would be very surprised. The main reason why my backups exist is to protect family photos.
 
It runs after hours every 5th day and so far I've only had to use it one time ....
 
What would I do...ahem...

To lose 5TB of porno would be a bad hit, but it is not quite everything...
 
All files for my shop are on a FreeNAS server using Raidz3, backup locally nightly, and backup to CrashPlan.
RaidZ3 might be a bit over kill, but I really don't want to have to explain to a customer that we lost all their files.
Home is using SnapRAID to recovering 1 disk failure and backup to CrashPlan
Accounting data is backed up locally then to CrashPlan.
Video surveillance is backed up to CrashPlan.
I get a lot of use out of my 10 machine CrashPlan yearly subscription.
 
Using free AOMEI backupper, I make an image backup of my OS every 2 weeks or so. I save this image backup to an external drive that I only use for this purpose, I also check the integrity of the backup after completion. In addition to this, I save all my data saved on my 2TB WD black drive, to 2 external 2 TB drives, 1 is a 2 TB WD Passport Ultra and the other a 2TB USB 3.0 Lacie Rugged Mini. Other stuff I wish to keep, I save to DVDs.
This backup strategy hasn't let me down yet.
 
Just last night I started backing up my 12-bay raidz2 freenas box to amazon cloud drive using rclone. Currently 60GB through with my ~10TB. Should finish in about a month, then sync after that should be quicker. I also want to have an off-site freenas box to sync snapshots to, but that's for another time.
 
Back