How to back up your personal data: a beginner's guide
If you’re rich and eccentric, you can pay to back up your personal data at the Arctic World Archive in a mountainside vault in Svalbard, Norway. The data is stored on piqlFilm, a medium designed to last for at least 500 years. Unfortunately, backing up 100 GB will cost you €8,500 or $9,250.
A much more reasonably priced option is Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive, which both have $2/month plans for 100 GB of storage. Here’s how to go about this:
Keep a copy of everything you want to save in folders on your computer’s hard drive and sync those folders to the cloud using the provider’s app. It’s very easy and automatic.
When your hard drive dies (and it will inevitably die), download everything from the cloud onto your new hard drive. It’s important to always have at least one copy in the cloud and one copy on your computer’s hard drive.
If something unexpectedly happens to the cloud copy of your data (e.g. the company goes bankrupt, the data centres get destroyed or damaged, there’s a cataclysmic cybersecurity incident, or, most likely, you individually lose access to your account), find another cloud provider and back up your data there.¹
To further lower your risk of losing data, buy an external hard drive. You can find a 2 TB drive for less than $100. Use a program like FreeFileSync to regularly back up your important files to the external drive.
So, you will have: 1) a copy of your files on your computer’s hard drive, 2) a copy in the cloud, and 3) a copy on an external hard drive. You will have three copies total and one of those copies won’t be located in your home, meaning the off-site copy will survive a fire, flood, or theft.
That’s it! You’re done!
Feeling paranoid? If you have the money to spare, you can back up your data to two different cloud providers with physically distinct data centres, e.g. Google and Microsoft. (Some cloud providers don’t operate their own data centres but rent servers from larger companies like Google, Microsoft, or Amazon.)
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