Data loss, it's all your fault!

Once again, we discover a call for help for a student who loses her computer on the train and thus her thesis. Particularly, this is relayed by the traditional media and the press.

But as always, the fault can only be attributed to the owner of his data since he did not have a backup of them.

I've been doing computers since 1981, prehistory for you, but a very formative time on learning about the volatility of digital data. Every self-respecting computer scientist has once or several times in his life erased a large amount of data by mistake. Personally, I lost all my photos over 4 complete years, sad, but not very serious in the end.

But, since the advent of the Internet, there is no reason for this to happen again since all my data is saved, more or less in real time, on at least 3 external supports and in different places.

Back up your computer

You say to yourself, that you have to be an experienced computer scientist to implement as much security as I do, but think again, it is very simple.

Time Machine

I'm lucky enough to work in an Apple environment and to have been able to take advantage, on all OSX operating systems for quite a few years now (I was too lazy to find the date, but it must date from Leopard, just after Tiger, or the other way around), of the automatic backup function every hour of the modified data on an external support connected to my computer.

This security is the minimum and is only there to compensate for a technical failure or to recover a recent file, because if your house burns down with the computer and the external disk, everything is lost.

Cloud solutions

To further improve security in case of fire, I take advantage of a backup solution in the cloud with 2 solutions, Dropbox and iCloud.

Dropbox is perfect for all users, regardless of their operating system, and allows you to back up data from shared folders on your computer in real time. This makes it easy to find them between several computers or when a computer is lost. A paid subscription is necessary to really take advantage of it, but what's 100€ per year to secure all your data.

iCloud is different because it is shared between all Apple machines and therefore I automatically save between my computers, phones, tablets, Apple TV, images, files, videos, applications, ... without doing anything. Very practical in addition since we can share the same subscription and therefore its storage space between all members of the same family using, of course, Apple products.

I know there are dozens of other services, but I'm only talking about the ones I know and have personally used for years.

The NAS

Here, personally, I would advise users who want to use this solution to find a geek buddy who has already implemented it, because it is really more complex.

I use it with 2 NAS in 2 different places and in permanent synchronization, which allows me to overcome the worries of flood or fire in one of the places, because if the 2 disappear there is a strong chance that I disappear at the same time and the loss of my data will matter less to me.

I use 2 Synology DiskStation DS119j NAS with 4TB disks. It's really the technical minimum to start and bring an additional security to my data.

Securing your online site

You certainly say to yourself that with your website, no risk, everything is taken care of by the host, but what will you do when your host will make the mistake of disappearing or that the server hosting your site will be destroyed or just erased by mistake?

I'm not kidding, it already happened in the past (just 7 years, nothing important) and that's why I wrote an article about the web server backup by an external service in addition to the backup offered by the host and the regular manual backup. I specify that I always use this service to safeguard and secure my websites with always as much happiness. The restoration methods can be multiple and meet all the needs or skills.

Conclusion

It is obvious, but I will repeat it again:

Save everything, all the time !!!!