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Thing 4: Backups

published on Jan 21, 2020

It’s vital to keep copies of information that is important to you and this is what a backup is – a copy. You should keep copies of your photographs, videos, music, documents, important emails and social media posts. These copies will allow you to recover from damage or loss of this data if something happens to one of your devices or online accounts.

You can backup smartphones and tablets through your computer, cloud storage or both. To backup to your computer, attach the device to your computer via the USB cable that came with it. You may need to install software, like iTunes in the case of Apple devices, to complete the process. Visit the device makers website if you need help with this. In most cases, you will be able to view and make copies of photos and videos stored on the device just by plugging it into your computer.

A faster and hassle-free way to make sure your device is always backed up is to use cloud storage. This continuously sends copies of your files, apps and settings to web servers belonging to Apple and Google. Setting this up will allow you to recover quickly if your device is wiped, stolen, lost or if you just happen to buy a new one. Here are how-to-guides to set up cloud storage on Apple iPhone/iPad and Google’s Android devices.

You don’t need special software to do this. Modern Windows and MacOS devices have backup features built into their operating systems already. Open your device settings menu and search for ‘backups’.

You should backup to either external storage like an external hard drive or cloud storage where copies of your backups are stored remotely via the internet.

You can attach an external hard drive or high capacity USB memory stick to your device and set Windows or MacOS to keep backup copies of your files on this drive. Protect yourself from ransomware by making sure the external hard drive or memory stick is not permanently connected to the device either physically or over a local network connection. Otherwise your backup is at risk of being deleted or encrypted by any malware as it infects your device. You may want to use two or more backup drives and keep one in another location in case your home is hit by flooding or fire and rotate these drives regularly.

Cloud storage is now a popular alternative to using external hard drives or USB memory sticks for backup. These guides from Microsoft (Windows) and Apple (Mac) explain how to setup cloud storage for your important files.

If your device has a CD, DVD or Blu-Ray writer then you can also make copies of important files by burning these to disk.

Imagine if you lost access to your email account? What would this mean? What information do you have stored here that might be important? If a hacker gets access to your email, they will likely try to lock you out of the account and/or delete any emails you keep there. Along with the hacker threat, email providers have been known to close accounts at short notice - especially in the case of free email services or where email was originally provided as part of a paid service, like broadband internet, you no longer subscribe to.

Download important emails to a safe place or print and file them away securely. Doing this will also allow you to delete them from your email inbox where they could fall into the hands of a cybercriminal if your account is hacked.

You will likely lose anything you have ever posted to social media website/app if your account gets hacked. The impact of this can be devasting if you have captured memories and moments here without copies elsewhere. Even without hacking, social media websites/apps have been known to delete old posts either deliberately or by accident.

Thankfully, nearly all social media websites/apps allow you to download copies of your posts so you can keep them safe. Look for a ‘download’ or ‘export’ option within your account settings. If this isn’t an option, download any photos or videos special to you and keep them somewhere you know they will be safe if something happened to your account or the website/app.

It’s not unusual for a backup to fail. Either because an automatic backup task stops running without warning or some problem means files cannot be restored from the backup copy.

Test your backups occasionally by making sure you can restore files from them. You want to be confident they will work properly if you ever need them.

If you have automatic backup tasks running, always check to make sure those tasks complete without errors. You don’t want to be in a position where you need backups only to find they stopped running several months ago or don’t include all the files you expect.

Backups can be vulnerable too, especially if you don’t keep them secure.

Consider using encryption if you backup to an external hard drive or USB memory stick. This will prevent someone else being able to plug it into their own computer to read your files if the backup is lost or stolen. On Windows 10 devices, you can use BitLocker to encrypt the drive with a password and Mac owners can easily use encryption as well. You will then be asked for the password each time you connect the drive to a computer.

When you backup to cloud services, it’s important these files don’t become accessible to just anyone. Use a long and unique password as well as two-factor authentication for these services.

Unless you are confident in what you are doing, avoid sharing files with others directly from cloud services. Doing this might create public links others can share without your knowledge or that can end up appearing in search engine results. It’s good practice to create two cloud storage accounts; one for backing up your personal files and another just for files you are happy to share with people.

Sensitive personal data should always be encrypted, especially if you keep it in the cloud. If privacy is important to you, then software like BoxCrypter can help you with this by encrypting your files wherever they are – on a hard drive, USB or in the cloud.

Links to more information

Activity

Take a moment to think about how important your documents, emails, posts, photos and videos are to you. What do you do at the moment to make sure you have copies of these? Then, for each of your devices or online accounts, consider how you can apply the advice given in this thing.