Regularly backing up your important files to a portable storage device like a flash drive or external hard drive and to the cloud isn’t going to protect you from being hacked, infected with malware or having your identity stolen. What it will do is safeguard important data and files if you are hacked or infected with malware.
Ransomware attacks against individual users are becoming increasingly common. Usually, ransomware will lock or encrypt a user’s files. If you don’t pay the ransom (you shouldn’t) your files are as good as gone.
Hacking and malware aren’t the only threats to your data. Computers, smartphones, and tablets can break, be lost or stolen. If you have important or irreplaceable files stored on a single device and it fails, gets misplaced or is stolen, there is no way to retrieve what you’ve lost.
As a result of some excruciating personal data losses (more on that later) and a decade and a half of providing tech support to hundreds of public school teachers I’ve developed one simple rule:
Any file you can’t afford to lose must be backed up to at least one external storage medium and one cloud backup service.
These days, an “external storage medium” is most likely going to be a flash drive or some kind of external hard drive. I have a couple of older high capacity drives connected to my desktop computer at home as well as a handful of SSDs (solid-state drives) that can be used as redundant storage and as a way to easily transport files without uploading them to the cloud.
There are many reasonably priced cloud storage options available in 2022. (If you’re not sure what “cloud backup” is, take a few minutes to read this earlier post.) If you’re particularly concerned with ransomware, you may not want to use services that automatically backup, or “sync” your data.
If the files on your computer are locked by ransomware and you use a service that automatically backs up everything to the cloud, it’s likely the encrypted files will end up in the cloud, taking the place of the previous, unlocked versions. If you want to avoid that, turn off syncing and just upload your important files manually on a regular basis.
Before automatic backup services like iCloud existed I got in the habit of storing photos and videos of my kids on a single external hard drive connected to my desktop computer. One day I sat down to edit some videos of my daughter and quickly realized that my photo/video drive had become corrupted and I couldn’t access my files.
I spent a couple of days using various repair and data recovery tools to try and salvage the files, but nothing worked. The photos and videos were gone for good.
In my capacity as an Instructional Technology Resource Teacher I’ve spent countless hours trying to recover teachers’ files from damaged flash drives. Sometimes I was the hero. Occasionally I’ve been able to save years, or even decades, of lesson plans, tests, quizzes and handouts from damaged or abused devices.
In other cases I’ve had to tell colleagues that their files are gone forever. Whenever I can, I try to persuade my coworkers that depending on a single computer, flash drive or CD-ROM for vital work files is a very risky business.
These days I have my devices (and my wife’s devices) set to backup family photos and videos to my iCloud account. I also configured iCloud to export photos and videos to Google Photos. In addition, I periodically export photos and videos from iCloud and store them on a high capacity SSD that I keep in my safe-deposit box.
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