Personal Offline Backups

The irony is that people who care about (backing up) their data tend to lose it...

Most just don't care and this approach is good enough. After all Google Photos, iCloud and similar services will take care of device backups automatically. And so will any of the messaging or social sharing sites. I do know some people who rely entirely on WhatsApp as their backup for photos and other stuff. That just works, as long as you do not have any special needs (such as storing certain file types or making sure the photos are not down-sampled).

Then there is a group of those who care a bit more. They purchase premium tiers of the cloud services, enabling them to store full resolution photos and other files by either manual uploads or automatic mirroring.

And then there is the very paranoid group who do not trust the cloud services. They take the most effort of setting up and maintaining local backup devices - most typically in form of NAS (Network Attached Storage) devices. All in faith of being the most protected. I too have been running a local NAS (hey, it's been around for almost 15 years!), but at some point I stopped considering it the primary backup. By that I mean it is handy for big files (such as videos or full machine backups), but I would not panic if the data was lost at some point.

I have some redundancy built-in, as actually I have two such NAS devices at two separate locations. So in theory a fire, a flood or a robbery is unlikely to affect both of them at the same time.

But considering what has recently happened to NAS devices made by Western Digital, the physical redundancy does not really help when a 0-day is suddenly exploited by hackers. This is when an offline backup device comes to rescue.

Way back I was trying to backup my data on optical discs. CD-ROMs and then DVDs and then BlueRays. This had never worked. The amount of data was growing faster then the capacity of the disks and the recording process was painful and unreliable. I realized many recorded DVDs did not play after sitting on a shelf for several years. During the same period the capacity (and speed!) of flash drives kept growing fast. To the point that today all it takes is a single credit-card size device and less than a minute to incrementally back up all important stuff.

Personally I'm using the 2TB (previous generation) of the SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD. It is very fast at around 300MB/s. And the current generation is even faster - approaching 1000MB/s, and you can even double that with the PRO version, provided your computer supports the USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 (dual lane) interface (today most don't). There are multiple software options, and personally I have settled on the Syncovery. It takes a little bit of time to create what they call "backup jobs" and then a job can be run with a single click. In my case it takes less than a minute to plug in the portable SSD, click the Syncovery, and wait for it to finish the job, which typically involves scanning folders containing about half a million files (documents, code, photos) and backing up about a thousand of the changed ones every week. Then I unplug the drive and store it in a safe place. I actually have two such drives: one that is in my laptop bag (in case the laptop breaks when I'm on the road and I need to restore the stuff on the go) and another one in the office (in case my laptop bag is lost (with the backup drive). Of course the backups should be encrypted, so when lost, I don't worry about someone making use of that data (but that is - I believe - entirely obvious now to everyone, as all operating systems support encrypted drives).

Finally, because the backups are offline, they will not fall prey to any online hacking attacks (which - as we see - are becoming the new normal we simply have to accept).