It only takes a minute of your time to copy your important files to a drive or the cloud. I (potentially) lost one year of progress on a book I’m writing because of my negligence.
So please don’t be like me.
It only takes a minute of your time to copy your important files to a drive or the cloud. I (potentially) lost one year of progress on a book I’m writing because of my negligence.
So please don’t be like me.
Can’t stress this enough, especially if you’re a server operator! Any data that doesn’t exist in at least 2 different places should be considered volatile. Also keep in mind that the “cloud” is just someone else’s computer and shouldn’t be used for backup, since you have no control over it and it requires a working Internet connection to access it. Better to get an external USB 3 drive with enough capacity to fit all your most important files; They’re relatively cheap (especially HDDs) and last a long time (my personal one that I got years ago has 48524 hours on it as I’m typing this and it’s still perfectly fine).
Local (and ideally offline) backups are great, but I also have remote backups to mitigate the risk of a catastrophic event happening at my home and destroying the hard drives. I have offline backups because then hacks and viruses are mitigated. With an always-connected hard drive a malicious actor could access it just like the primary drive.
Of course you don’t have control over cloud storage, but you can encrypt the data that’s sent there, and unless you have really poor internet connectivity I don’t see that being an issue. In the worst case you have to wait a day or so to be able to restore something, but better that than it being lost forever.
You’re right. I have both local and online options so I maximise the chances of file safety but my work is the only thing I didn’t make a recent backup thereof, even though it’s the easiest thing to backup out of my files.