Backed Up and Feeling Safe
The Importance of Backup
I'm not talking here about your website's backup, although that's really important too.
Wealthy Affiliate backs up all your websites daily at the server end and keeps those backups for several days.
Which is great, though I've posted before why I think you should keep your own backup as well and store it on your local hard disk. That's a separate conversation.
No One Else Will Protect Your Computer's Data
What I'm talking about here is your own computer system.
Do you understand that ALL your precious data is held on a substrate of metal on plastic spinning at high speed and being encoded in bits and bytes by a magnetic read/write head? Totally dependent on multiple factors being just right?
Have you ever heard a hard disk crash, where the read/write head plows into the substrate? It's not a pretty sound.
Not a risk with an SSD, of course but they have their own issues.
Because of the reliability of modern technology, you are nowhere near the risk of losing all your data as you were a few years ago, but the devasting consequences are the same.
So... BACKUP YOUR COMPUTER
There are undoubtedly excellent backup options to the cloud.
I'm going to leave that to others to tell you about. I like backup I can hold in my hand.
I have an external HDD that I copy the essential stuff to once a month and keep 3 generations of. The essential stuff are my Documents, Pictures and Desktop folders. The Documents folder includes a password-protected Word doc that has all of the credentils needed to reinstall all of the software I've purchased and downloaded.
So if I lost everything, I could restore it to a new computer with some effort, probably at least a full day's work, and up to a month old.
Better than nothing.
Here's What I've Done Now
I went out and bought a portable SSD drive. I'd prefer bigger but the largest capacity I could get was 1TB. I'd previously bought a 4TB SSD through the internet at a ridiculously low price but it was crap, so I guess you get what you pay for.
After researching and trying out several backup softwares, I settled on Macrium Reflect. after a recommendation from another WA member. It has a free version, a paid version and a free trial of the paid version. No credit card required and the free trial reverts to the free version after it runs out. What a great business model!
I've set it up so that it does a full backup of my system on the Monday of each week, followed by incremental backups each day. This means that I can totally restore my system from the extenal SSD if I should suffer a total loss and it would be completely up to date.
The first total backup started at 9am today and took around 3.5 hours with no issues, taking up a bit over half a terabyte. The first incremental backup (which backs up only changes that have taken place since the previous backup) will take place at 9am tomorrow. So next Monday will see a complete replacement.
But here's the thing...
Operating Normally
The whole time the backup was running, I was using my computer normally. Interacting with WA, writing blog posts, checking emails etc. There was no noticeable slowdown! Whether this was a function of Win11 or Macrium Reflect I don't know but the combination was awesome.
Conclusion
Don't risk losing everything. Put some sort of backup in place now!
Recent Comments
58
Phil, you are absolutely correct in that backups are the ultimate saviors when dealing with computers! I should know, over the years, I have lost thousands of bytes of data, music, and photos.
I guess I should have backed up my my backups. With cloud backups so inexpensive these days, it is worth the investment to look into it.
You can still utilize a external SSD (solid state drive) for personal data.
Canty
Thank you, Canty. I sleep better knowing that all my websites and my computer as a whole are backed up.
Hi, Phil
Great post!
All our computers and phones at home are wirelessly backed up to an Apple Time Capsule (local encrypted drive) and to Apple iCloud. Even the SSDs in my digital recording studio and modeling guitar amplifiers are backed up in realtime.
I also have an encrypted external SanDisk 1 TB SSD that I use to do some "on the fly" backups of medical acoustics engineering data.
At my medical office, our Healthcare IT Network Administrator backs up all our computers (PCs and Apple).
I run everything thorough a virtualization with VMWare so if someone gabs a laptop they don't get any private or professional data.
Frank
That's probably the best backup system I've ever come across, Frank. Congratulations. You must shake your head in wonder at the many people who risk losing their business by not backing up at all 😒
Thanks, Phil!
I bought one of the very first external hard drives way back in the 1980s to backup files on a Commodore Amiga computer. I was estimating the ejection fraction from raytrace animations of cardiac MRI images.
It was a 20 MB (not GB) hard drive (God, I'm getting old)! The drive wasn't "Plug & Play." I had to add an interface card to the computer and mount it as a logical device by configuring it with "Amiga DOS" commands.
At the time, I was doing my internship in internal medicine and there was only one MRI machine for the entire state of Rhode Island. It had a magnetic flux density of less than 1 Tesla and was inside a trailer that went from hospital to hospital!
It seems I might have a bit of the "Security Shinny Object Syndrome." 😊🔐
(Kindly forgive any typos. I am writing this on my iPhone while walking down a corridor, dodging gurneys)
Frank
Thanks for that bit of history, Frank. Yes, I remember all that stuff too. When Plug 'n' Play first came out, we used to refer to it as Plug 'n' Pray.
Haah!
Things have gotten much easier, but the downside is that it's more difficult it is to use the new operating systems as a real computer.
The last Windows OS I really liked was Windows XP! Now you have to drill down through so much GUI to get to the actual computing end of things.
Programs like MatLab and Wolfram Mathematica ran great in a native environment on most systems. I used to run them both in Unix OS and it was very straightforward. Now they can be such memory hogs in a windows interface.
Great advice Phil. My HDD is also 1 tetra byte and for the price, it helps me sleep easy.
I have never heard of Macrium Reflec, do they save to cloud or their own servers. Actually, I should look, just being lazy. lol.
Scan disk do have a 4TB external SSD , running out at $500.
"SanDisk’s Extreme v2 is one of the best portable 10 Gbps SSDs for content creators on the go. Powered by a fast NVMe SSD and sporting a USB 3.2 Gen 2 bridge chip, SanDisk’s Extreme v2 packs twice the performance of its predecessor and offers increased security with hardware-accelerated full disk encryption.
Not only does it respond quickly when reading your media files or documents, but even when taxed with large write transfers, it is one of the fastest-writing portable USB 10Gbps SSDs for the price. The Extreme v2’s design is similar to the Extreme Pro v2, but it is smaller and lighter. That said, the Extreme v2 lacks the rigid aluminum construction and power indicator light we see with the more expensive model. However, the Extreme v2 is fairly priced, IP55 water and dust resistant, available in capacities up to 4TB, and comes backed by a 5-year warranty.
Stephen
Thanks, Stephen. I haven't investigated Cloud backup at all, but intend to do so.
The Extreme V2 sounds great but pricey. 10Gbps is impressive. I'm getting 6 out of my portable SSD.
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Good morning Phil,
Thank you for your great blog post, a very wise and good post indeed.
It sounds like you have a great system going, Phil, which is so important. It's good that your computer didn't slow down, that's one of the reasons why I like to have a reasonably powered computer that can cope with multitasking.
Out of interest what backup SSD did you purchase? I guess you carried out some research before purchasing? It's good to know what members use and why so that we can learn from each other.
Have a great day.
Roy
Thanks for following this Roy. Yeah, I'm getting there.
The first SSD I bought was 4TB, through the internet, cheap and, most importantly of all...
Totally unreliable.
So I went down to the local computer store and bought a 1TB Samsung SSD for about 4 times the price. It's not really big enough, but it was the biggest they had. Seems totally reliable though.
I'll get a larger one when they become available.
Thank you for providing the information, Phil, I've always found this type of thing interesting. Especially when it comes to what people purchase and what's good, bad and works etc.
4 TB is a large SSD, I guess that would be fairly expensive, however, it is disappointing that it didn't work properly. I guess it comes back to the same old story, you get what you pay for.
I have a 2 TB Seagate external hard drive, unfortunately, this is not an SSD, although it's fine for doing regular backups on my Windows PC. I also use One Drive which seems to work quite well for me and syncs between my desktop and laptop.
About a year ago I had a 2 TB SSD fitted to my old laptop, which had a traditional 500 GB drive which is working fine. The laptop is almost 8 years old, however, it's a decent machine and it was definitely worth spending £160 on an SSD. The old one worked fine, I just thought it would be a good thing to do. It is also obviously very quick when I turn the laptop on.
Just for your interest, I have purchased extra RAM and hard drives from Crucial, so far with no problems.
Have a great day.
Roy
I guess if it's a choice between a 4TB with problems and a 1TB with none, it's pretty clear which one you use, hey.
My desktop has a 512MB SSD that I keep all my software on and a 2TB HDD for data. It's a great combination and is fast and reliable.
Good morning Phil,
That's very true, it's impossible to work productively with something that's unreliable.
SSD's have really speeded up computers, I also like the idea of not having something spinning in my PC. I mean from the point of view, anything that moves has a greater tendency to wear out. It sounds like you have a good combination and the main thing is that it works.
Have a great day.
Roy
Thanks, Roy. There's little doubt that HDDs are on the way out and SSDs will plummet in price.
I hope so, Phil. I recently purchased a new Dell laptop for my wife as her old HP laptop wasn't particularly powerful. (To be fair I never did like it!) This time I purchased one with an SSD in.
However, I was quite surprised how many laptops still have the traditional hard drive. Especially as SSD's have been out for several years now.
Roy
There'll be a tipping point where the price of SSDs to the laptop manufactures plummet and they run out of HDD stock. Remember the introduction of flat-screen TVs?
I guess that's true, Phil! I do remember the introduction of flat screens, more on the computer side than the TV as I didn't have a TV for years! I didn't miss much!
I also remember the big monitor that I had with my first PC, back in 2001. It was almost deeper than it was in width! It's amazing how things change!
Roy
New technology makes all the difference. The basic drawback of a CRT screen is that to get extra screen size, the emitter has to be further from the screen, increasing the depth.
My point about the early flat screen TVs were that they were 42" and cost thousands of dollars. Now you can't get one that small and the smallest is a couple of hundred dollars.