Every now and then, as a computer-savvy person, I get a desperate call from a friend / family member, asking for help with their dead phone / PC / hard drive.

Or maybe they deleted a file accidentally and hope it can be recovered.

Or maybe they’re just desperate after the theft of such a device.

Either way, they lost some precious data and hope I can help them recovering it.

Sometimes, there’s something to be done ; often, there’s not.

But regardless of the resolution, I usually use this occasion to stress the importance of backups, in hope that it will prevent any future occurrence of a similar event.

Scope

This post is aimed at anyone who has some personal data they don’t want to lose …

… which means literally everyone, I guess.

Even though various tools and solutions will be mentioned as examples, this post does not intend to provide you with a simple definite answer about what you should do. (Such an answer doesn’t exist anyway.)

Instead, I’ll try to make you ask yourself the right questions, and give pointers on how to answer them.

This post is aimed at individuals, and while the general reasoning can be transposed for companies/assotiations/etc, the examples given will likely lack relevance.

It all starts with questions

What data do you have ?

This is likely the most important question, but certainly not the easiest one.

Try to make a complete inventory, using the following hints not to forget anything :

  • location :

    • your personal computer
    • your phone
    • your work computer ?
    • any cloud service (drive, etc…)
    • any mobile storage (external hard drive, usb stick, etc…)

  • type :

    • pictures
    • official documents (payslips, tax forms, etc…)
    • downloaded/installed stuff

What data do you need to backup ?

The above inventory likely gives out a lot of stuff, not all stuff that you care about.

Let’s refine this list.

For each piece of data, ask yourself what would happen if you lost it :

  • Could you rebuild it or somehow get it back ?
  • Would it be a lot of work ?
  • What would the impact be ?
  • How big is it ?

A few examples :

  • Photos/videos you made yourself : usually entirely impossible to recreate if lost, contain a lot of memories that would be painful to lose, moderately big. Definitely want to save them.

  • Official documents (payslips, medical records, etc) : you might be able to re-download many of these from the corresponding websites, but likely not all. Many have a limited historical retention, or will crash / close / be partially migrated to a new system in the years to come. Hard to know which ones will actually be needed someday in the future, but the impact could be critical. And they’re pretty small overall. Probably a good idea to save them.

  • Anything short-lived or freely downloadable : yeah, who cares ? Half of this stuff is obsolete already anyway (newer version available for software installers, documents you just needed to print once, etc…). The other half probably won’t matter long enough anyway. Doesn’t really matter for most of them.

  • Movies / music downloaded here and there (legally ofc !) : this one’s a bit trickier, since those can take a lot of space. It might be easy to re-download, or it might … not.

How does the data change ?

As you live, your data evolves.

  • What is append-only ? (new payslips are generated every month, old ones never change. You take new pictures. Etc.)
  • How often does the data change ? (New sms. My notes for a scool lesson that change every day until the chapter is over, then doesn’t ever change anymore)

How could you lose the data ?

This part doesn’t change much, it’s basically the same for everyone. Here is a mostly exhaustive list of what could happen to your precious data :

  • Accidental deletion

    • That’s why replication without historization is not a backup. What good is having 5 copies of a file, if it’s instantly deleted everywhere ?

  • Single-device hardware failure / loss / theft

    • Hard drives fail, laptops and phones get stolen, etc …
    • You need to assume any device can stop working at any given time, and plan accordingly

  • Multi-device hardware failure / loss / theft, such as :

    • Laptop and external hard drive in a single stolen bag
    • Every device in your home at once, after someone breaks in and steals everything
    • Several or every device in your home, after a fire / flood / power grid incident…

  • Intentional deletion by a third-party

    • Ransomware infection
    • Targeted attack (although admittedly, that’s not really a concern for most people, it could still take surprising forms, such as a former partner trying to avenge or something)

The first two points incite to have something frequent, ideally automated.

The last two suggest a second level of backup, for disaster recovery purposes. These can be far less frequent, and manual.

Any general advice for me ?

A few rules of thumb, to keep in mind :

  • You can never have too much backups
  • “Schrödinger’s backup” : The viability of a backup is unknown until a restore is attempted -> Test your backups regularly if you can.
  • No matter how you choose to backup, it should be automated. Manual backups tend to get forgotten and happen just rarely enough not to be reliable.

Accessible solution examples

A collection of bits of solution, you’ll likely want to mix and match several of those

Copy stuff on hard drives

That works.

Way too manual in my opinion, but some people make it work decently with discipline.

Make sure to have more that one copy though.

You can have the disasted recovery in the form of a second hard drive that you store at someone else’s (say, your parents…), and swap every now and then.

Various clouds

The very nice thing with clouds is that you can usually have some kind of app to automatically upload and backup various stuff from your phone, especially pictures and videos.

This is also a decent way to store files in a way that is not subect to any kind of hardware failure / loss / theft, so, good candidate for disaster recovery.

Keep in mind however that all of this data is now in the hands of a provider, it’s up to you to decide whether you can trust them with it or not.

OS-level backups

Time Machine (Mac) and File History (Windows) are native solutions that allow you to have important files backed up to external storage.

You can automate them to something networked (like a NAS), or at least have a dedicated hard drive onto which a backup is automatically made when you plug it. That’s not too bad in terms of automation.

Mobile devices

The good news is that most stuff installed on phones is cloud-based nowadays, meaning logging back on your new phone is usually enough for most services.

On Android, you’re not gonna get a full system backup anyway, so, that’s a relief. I’d recommend making sure you have a way to backup contacts/pictures/videos, and call it a day.

I hear the situation is better in the iPhone landscape, with iCloud backups. Still the same issue of privacy, though.

Backup software

There’s a lot of software out there specifically for backing up stuff.

  • Some is free, some is paid.
  • Some comes with included storage, some lets you plug yours.
  • Some is available on multiple platforms, some isn’t.

Once again, have a look and try to see which ones correspond best.

I hear very good things about duplicati, coupled with some kind of online storage.

It seems to have all the good bits I would expect from a general-purpose backup software :

  • deduplication (the same data is only stored once even if it is present across multiple times)
  • compression
  • client-side encryption (data is encrypted before being sent to storage, so even the storage provider can’t read it. Don’t lose the keys though.)

And what’s your own setup ?

I currently have :

  • A self-hosted Nextcloud server to centralize most of my documents, pictures, videos, as well as cadendars, contacts.

  • My phone is Android :

    • Photos/videos uploaded directly to Nextcloud
    • Contacts, Calendar : synced with Nextcloud
    • Call logs and SMS : backed up to an email account with SMS Backup+
    • Everything else : Cloud-based, so no backup required

  • Multiple servers here and there (including the one hosting Nextcloud), backed up to a backup server with Borgbackup

    • Backups are very frequent (like, daily), and get progressively cleaned up to 1 per month (kept forever)
    • Laptop/desktop are backed up similarly, but hourly, and only when connected to my home network

I plan to add :

  • A disaster-recovery level, sending data directly from each machine to some kind of cloud storage.
  • Maybe dropping hard drives somewhere as a second level of disaster recovery.

I’m quite happy with this setup, I’m however afraid it’s way too complicated technically to recommend it to most people.

Conclusion

This ended up being a pretty lenghty piece.

I hope you see a bit more clearly what you can and should do, and how.

Please let me know if you see something missing :)