If someone is a less able, cognitively impaired, or perhaps very young - It would be good to see what advice HN would give them for protecting their data from ransomware, theft, or disaster.
You just have to find some tools and services that are "fire and forget."
This is what I do:
1. All my working files are in my Dropbox account (or my corporate Dropbox account). I did this initially to support working off two machines interchangeably, but the fact of the matter is that this creates an easy versioned backup of your "live" files. Nowadays, my Dropbox is fully mirrored on TWO backup computers here in my office (ie, a spare machine and an old machine).
Setup Effort: Minimal.
Ongoing Effort: Almost zero.
2. Because I use a Mac, I have Time Machine. It's glorious and can save your butt. It's the ONLY of these mechanisms I've ever had to use at scale (after a break-in and a stolen laptop). It worked flawlessly. Use it if you can. Every year or so, I get a new TM drive and archive the old one.
Setup Effort: VERY Minimal.
Ongoing Effort: Zero.
3. I also use Backblaze for offsite backup security. I happen to live on the gulf coast, so major storms are a concern, but there's probably some house-eating danger wherever YOU live.
Setup Effort: Moderate.
Ongoing Effort: Minimal.
4. Finally -- and this is the only part that needs actual action -- periodically I take a full image backup of my main machine's drive and archive it.
Setup Effort: Moderate.
Ongoing Effort: Moderate.
I keep my newest image and my last TM drive in someone else's house, too, but that MAY be paranoia.
My advice now to family is not to rely on anything - assume you'll lose everything and dont worry about it. Concentrate on a few things that actually matter - like photos. Buy an external drive and copy all the photos to the drive. Buy a new drive every year or two and put the old one in someone else's house for safe storage.
>assume you'll lose everything and dont worry about it.
I completely reject this premise. I'm baffled why you think it's reasonable, honestly.
In backups, even for simple people, one is none and two is one. Online services are DEAD cheap, and can provide versioned backup that protects against creeping corruption and the like.
Why is that? Is there a history of losing photos from Google or iCloud? Buying a flash drive every year means you don't have a backup between the time you take the photo and your next flash drive, and if your risk profile is dropping your phone down the toilet, that sounds like a bad idea to me.
edit: leaving my original comment but I realise that the parent called for buying a new drive every year, not just backing up every year - my bad. That said, with this approach you still need to track where your backups are and when they were last backed up. That's definitely going to be more error prone than an automated system.
I should say that the advice is not just for the cognitively impaired but also regular people, and even smart, technically adept people.
As an analogy, you might be the greatest surgeon in the world but you may still want to ask a nutritionist to help you make sense of the varying, contradictory studies that come in.
The problem you have identified also effects the cognitively overwhelmed which is all of us.
What do folks use to ensure integrity? I messed around with CRC32 in the filename for a while, but that's a pain to keep up with. Lots of fiddly custom scripts involved. It's dead-simple if everything is on ZFS all the time, of course, but if you want to ensure that files haven't been damaged after 20 copies across as many drives and "cloud" services, ideally without having to drag two or more other copies out of wherever they're stored, what's the solution? Some formats (Flac, I think) embed a hash in the metadata, but most don't. Hell, I've considered putting everything in IPFS just so I get consistency hashing across all filesystems "for free".
More generally, I guess the problem is that there's a lot of pain and duplicated effort all over the place due to there still not being a really good, well-supported, cross-FS and cross-OS file metadata scheme.
I steer people who don't know technology to Apple and mac. Enabling and paying for iCloud backup is probably the easiest. We're basically to the point where you can throw your phone off the bridge, walk into the Apple Store, log into a new phone and be back where you started. For a laptop I like the ease of the Time Capsule and time machine.
More broadly I think this speaks to the power of defaults. I recently had a family member lose everything (house fire) including all of his iDevices. He thought he'd lost the photos on them - he didn't even know he had iCloud backups - but as soon as we got a new device on his account, there they were.
Syncthing helps prevent against theft and disaster. Syncthing with an offline backup policy helps mitigate against ransomware, but unfortunately any policy that moves bits from one place to another allows an attack vector for malicious bits to infect the target device to which bits are being transferred.
I personally found Syncthing too complex, unpolished and confusing to be worth it, and I am an experienced software engineer in my 30s. And you’re recommending it for people who are “cognitively impaired, less able” etc? Absolutely silly.
Old school: get an external SSD, drag and drop files.
New school: get a Macbook and an iPhone and use iCloud.
For programmers: Make an auto-backup script to an S3 bucket for very cheap storage, backing up only what you want (e.g. adding a flag to ignore node_modules when backing up your computer).
Configure cron jobs to run automatically so they dont have to do anything on their end. Even if you're on a mobile device, you can install a terminal emulator and run rclone there.
Im a professional tattoo artist and and I've been collecting pictures data in particular pretty extensively for over a decade... I have roughly 2tb cloud storage on each cloud service.. One drive and Google drive. Photos and videos and various graphic file extensions like.. Psd .Tiff .Actn etc... I've grown a bit professionally and so now instead of just dumping new art and photos of my tattoos and marketing graphics etc... I'm in desperate need of spring cleaning I plan to metatag all photos running them all through lighten cataloging them all and maintain upkeep moving forward from there. As you know both these services are as useless as tits on a bull, but it is what it is I have to work with one or the other or both.
Folder to Folder transfers need to be fast or this is going to be impossible ... Should I do all moving around if files folders etc. On an external HD? then re upload? And please for the love of God someone tell me that there is a tool service or software or poor unfortunate slave out there that can be used to automatically Catagorize photos... One that optically, can analyze each one and determine if it's a photo of a tattoo on a person's body, differentiating from photos of graphics, artwork, objects... Etc. Please help!! my poor habbits have ruined my digital existence.... MUST LIVE AGAIN!!
I will go on a limb and say: buy them an iPhone and a Macbook and teach them how to use iCloud for backups. For cognitively imparied people you cannot do much better than that.
Encrypted Time Machine on Mac OS is a good start. By no means a perfect solution, but it's free if you have an external drive (even an older one). If the drive is clean, the setup process will take under 5 minutes. I just run it once a month, putting an event in calendar to remind me to do the next.
If money isn't an issue, BackBlaze's options are interesting. Check out Arq backup too. Once you get either Backblaze or Arq backup, you can backup your backup drive of time machine images. Not terribly efficient, sure, but again, doesn't really require too much configuration. Minimizing friction for each step and trying to automate them are the best paths to success.
If this is a mobile device, iCloud for photos is a good enough options for most people. Yeah, apple's gonna scan, but so is Google Photos, or any other service that uploads images to the internet.
I really wish apple would do an E2EE time machine to the cloud one day! That would really unlock backups for a lot more less technical people.
Supposedly part of the on-device CSAM stuff was so they could do End to end encryption on iCloud backups. I get why people were upset about it, but I worry it comes at the cost of that E2EE feature.
This is what I do for our family computer. All our photos and videos are on the family computer, it continuously backs up to backblaze with forever history and we push all our photos and videos to Google Photos, too.
We print the photos we really like and put them in albums. If our house burns down and we lose the albums and computer, we still have Google Photos and backblaze. If either Google or backblaze end their relationship with us, we still have our local copies and albums (and the other service).
We do pay for Google storage and for backblaze, but I think it comes out to around $12/month.
- Data is abused (somebody uses it against you in some way)
Disaster destroys, theft & ransomware destroys and/or abuses your data
Security against "abusing your data" is afaik: encrypting your data, using different passwords, never trust a link in an email (allways use the links you commonly use). BUT: this is difficult and unlikely done even by a average user.
Security against losing data is: backup or sync : backup is done best to my knowledge in apple devices. it also features sync. othervise i'd recommend dropbox, it can also recover some of the data you accidentially delete.
printing things is also still a good backup of important data
It depends so much on the devices. The easiest option is going to be the one that's built into the device/OS/etc. That's not maybe a very useful answer, but there you have it.
This is how I do it and my work does too, with Druva. You don't have to think about a single thing except telling it if you store files in weird places. Could not be simpler.
With web applications, this question is significantly harder to answer.
Assuming they're using files on a desktop computer, find a magic backup or sync product. They all have pros and cons.
I used to develop Syncplicity. It could backup "My Documents" and "Desktop" automatically, but you still had to manually add folders outside of those defaults. It was useful for a "magic backup" of things that could upload and download easily; but it wasn't going to just snapshot an entire computer.
If you want to snapshot an entire computer, a lot of posts in the thread recommend Time Machine for Mac. Just understand the tradeoffs: Do you want to snapshot the entire computer, but you don't care about "cloud" features? Do you want "cloud" features like sharing, backup even when you're not home, but you don't care about restoring a computer to an exact point in time?
> hook up to computer via spare USB port on the back
> set up automatic backups
> done!
It's my go-to for "not techie" parents and grandparents and never failed me with less than 10 minutes of active work. Pretty easy to migrate into new computers too.
(1)I distrust anything connected to the cloud more than I do stuff I can own.
General idea should be to treat the computer as a dispensable unit, kind of local cache of primary data which is remote. It is backwards, but this entrusts the "data" into more able and knowledgeable care.
As an example, look no further as mobile/smartphone etc. platforms. The locally acquired data is automatically transferred to some online cloud. All needed for that is a steady and fast internet and suffucient quotas.
Should the disaster hit, at least the bulk of "data" would be duplicated in the cloud(s). Assuming the cloud providers are mainstream, chances are the data could be retrievable from the new/repaired computer.
All comes down to the definition and the value of the "data".
Also, makes sense to have a practical way to keep an inventory of the installed and used applications and obviously the accounts/passwords.
Time Machine is among the easiest backup solutions I've ever used. Just enable it, point at a USB hard drive or compatible network share, and it just works. Restoring files or rolling back the state of the whole machine takes just a few clicks. Of course, if the backup media is in the same location as your mac, it's susceptible to theft, fire, etc. And you need to be using macOS.
If you just want to keep files and don't care about your OS, most cloud providers desktop clients work fine - Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, etc. And they have the added bonus of keeping things in sync across multiple machines, which allows for working across multiple devices, and also each instance is another backup of your files (provided it's set to actually download synced files immediatley, rather than on-demand, as OneDrive defaults to).
I have more experience with OneDrive than other providers, since I use it for work.
Pros:
- Two-stage recycle bin. If you delete a file, it goes in a recycle bin. If you delete it from there as well, it goes into another recyle bin & can still be restored.
- Can sync your Documents, Pictures and Desktop folders in addition to the OneDrive folder, at least on Windows.
Cons:
- Doesn't handle large numbers of files well. Syncing 1000+ 500KB files can take the better part of a day.
- Only downloads to the local machine on demand by default (but you can change this).
As a set-and-forget solution with a little more setup effort, a commercial NAS (think Synology, QNAP, etc) & their software for backing up your PC should work well. Many NAS's have a feature to back up your NAS (or a portion of your data) to a friends NAS - and they can back up their data on yours. Buy one for youself and your parents/grandparents, and then you all have offsite backups for the family photos. LTT has a good demo of this, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpxBmxj5mP0
I think there is a minimum level of computer proficiency needed to utilise a backup solution. So many people don't understand the concept of files and folders, or a filesystem, and I imagine the managing backups would be a stretch for them, unless they spent some time learning about these concepts. If a university student can't understand that their work is saved in a folder and not in Word, they're going to have a hell of a time trying to use OneDrive.
[+] [-] ubermonkey|4 years ago|reply
You just have to find some tools and services that are "fire and forget."
This is what I do:
1. All my working files are in my Dropbox account (or my corporate Dropbox account). I did this initially to support working off two machines interchangeably, but the fact of the matter is that this creates an easy versioned backup of your "live" files. Nowadays, my Dropbox is fully mirrored on TWO backup computers here in my office (ie, a spare machine and an old machine).
Setup Effort: Minimal. Ongoing Effort: Almost zero.
2. Because I use a Mac, I have Time Machine. It's glorious and can save your butt. It's the ONLY of these mechanisms I've ever had to use at scale (after a break-in and a stolen laptop). It worked flawlessly. Use it if you can. Every year or so, I get a new TM drive and archive the old one.
Setup Effort: VERY Minimal. Ongoing Effort: Zero.
3. I also use Backblaze for offsite backup security. I happen to live on the gulf coast, so major storms are a concern, but there's probably some house-eating danger wherever YOU live.
Setup Effort: Moderate. Ongoing Effort: Minimal.
4. Finally -- and this is the only part that needs actual action -- periodically I take a full image backup of my main machine's drive and archive it.
Setup Effort: Moderate. Ongoing Effort: Moderate.
I keep my newest image and my last TM drive in someone else's house, too, but that MAY be paranoia.
[+] [-] b112|4 years ago|reply
You just have to find some tools and services that are "fire and forget."
You just lost 99.99% of the population.
[+] [-] cloogshicer|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Scarbutt|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zz865|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ubermonkey|4 years ago|reply
I completely reject this premise. I'm baffled why you think it's reasonable, honestly.
In backups, even for simple people, one is none and two is one. Online services are DEAD cheap, and can provide versioned backup that protects against creeping corruption and the like.
Single drive backup plans are malpractice.
[+] [-] duxup|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maccard|4 years ago|reply
edit: leaving my original comment but I realise that the parent called for buying a new drive every year, not just backing up every year - my bad. That said, with this approach you still need to track where your backups are and when they were last backed up. That's definitely going to be more error prone than an automated system.
[+] [-] omarhaneef|4 years ago|reply
As an analogy, you might be the greatest surgeon in the world but you may still want to ask a nutritionist to help you make sense of the varying, contradictory studies that come in.
The problem you have identified also effects the cognitively overwhelmed which is all of us.
[+] [-] handrous|4 years ago|reply
More generally, I guess the problem is that there's a lot of pain and duplicated effort all over the place due to there still not being a really good, well-supported, cross-FS and cross-OS file metadata scheme.
[+] [-] more_corn|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] willidiots|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cybernautique|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] playpause|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 65|4 years ago|reply
New school: get a Macbook and an iPhone and use iCloud.
For programmers: Make an auto-backup script to an S3 bucket for very cheap storage, backing up only what you want (e.g. adding a flag to ignore node_modules when backing up your computer).
[+] [-] aborsy|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] howolduis|4 years ago|reply
https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_sync/
Configure cron jobs to run automatically so they dont have to do anything on their end. Even if you're on a mobile device, you can install a terminal emulator and run rclone there.
[+] [-] ramses0|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] michaelgrafl|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Dreadztattoos|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] estaseuropano|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 988747|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kylehotchkiss|4 years ago|reply
If money isn't an issue, BackBlaze's options are interesting. Check out Arq backup too. Once you get either Backblaze or Arq backup, you can backup your backup drive of time machine images. Not terribly efficient, sure, but again, doesn't really require too much configuration. Minimizing friction for each step and trying to automate them are the best paths to success.
If this is a mobile device, iCloud for photos is a good enough options for most people. Yeah, apple's gonna scan, but so is Google Photos, or any other service that uploads images to the internet.
I really wish apple would do an E2EE time machine to the cloud one day! That would really unlock backups for a lot more less technical people.
[+] [-] sircastor|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] endisneigh|4 years ago|reply
If you're somewhat capable you could even set it up so the entirety of your OneDrive or equivalent is copied to another provider.
[+] [-] monkey_monkey|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bradfa|4 years ago|reply
We print the photos we really like and put them in albums. If our house burns down and we lose the albums and computer, we still have Google Photos and backblaze. If either Google or backblaze end their relationship with us, we still have our local copies and albums (and the other service).
We do pay for Google storage and for backblaze, but I think it comes out to around $12/month.
[+] [-] rspoerri|4 years ago|reply
- Data is destroyed
- Data is abused (somebody uses it against you in some way)
Disaster destroys, theft & ransomware destroys and/or abuses your data
Security against "abusing your data" is afaik: encrypting your data, using different passwords, never trust a link in an email (allways use the links you commonly use). BUT: this is difficult and unlikely done even by a average user.
Security against losing data is: backup or sync : backup is done best to my knowledge in apple devices. it also features sync. othervise i'd recommend dropbox, it can also recover some of the data you accidentially delete.
printing things is also still a good backup of important data
[+] [-] jan_Inkepa|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] woofcat|4 years ago|reply
It's a paid solution but simple enough for my mother.
[+] [-] Noumenon72|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gwbas1c|4 years ago|reply
Assuming they're using files on a desktop computer, find a magic backup or sync product. They all have pros and cons.
I used to develop Syncplicity. It could backup "My Documents" and "Desktop" automatically, but you still had to manually add folders outside of those defaults. It was useful for a "magic backup" of things that could upload and download easily; but it wasn't going to just snapshot an entire computer.
If you want to snapshot an entire computer, a lot of posts in the thread recommend Time Machine for Mac. Just understand the tradeoffs: Do you want to snapshot the entire computer, but you don't care about "cloud" features? Do you want "cloud" features like sharing, backup even when you're not home, but you don't care about restoring a computer to an exact point in time?
[+] [-] kradeelav|4 years ago|reply
> hook up to computer via spare USB port on the back
> set up automatic backups
> done!
It's my go-to for "not techie" parents and grandparents and never failed me with less than 10 minutes of active work. Pretty easy to migrate into new computers too.
(1)I distrust anything connected to the cloud more than I do stuff I can own.
[+] [-] ryankrage77|4 years ago|reply
Good idea. The WD My Cloud service was hacked a while back, and some driver owners lost all their data.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/24/22549677/wd-my-book-live-...
[+] [-] zoomablemind|4 years ago|reply
General idea should be to treat the computer as a dispensable unit, kind of local cache of primary data which is remote. It is backwards, but this entrusts the "data" into more able and knowledgeable care.
As an example, look no further as mobile/smartphone etc. platforms. The locally acquired data is automatically transferred to some online cloud. All needed for that is a steady and fast internet and suffucient quotas.
Should the disaster hit, at least the bulk of "data" would be duplicated in the cloud(s). Assuming the cloud providers are mainstream, chances are the data could be retrievable from the new/repaired computer.
All comes down to the definition and the value of the "data".
Also, makes sense to have a practical way to keep an inventory of the installed and used applications and obviously the accounts/passwords.
[+] [-] ryankrage77|4 years ago|reply
If you just want to keep files and don't care about your OS, most cloud providers desktop clients work fine - Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, etc. And they have the added bonus of keeping things in sync across multiple machines, which allows for working across multiple devices, and also each instance is another backup of your files (provided it's set to actually download synced files immediatley, rather than on-demand, as OneDrive defaults to).
I have more experience with OneDrive than other providers, since I use it for work.
Pros:
- Two-stage recycle bin. If you delete a file, it goes in a recycle bin. If you delete it from there as well, it goes into another recyle bin & can still be restored.
- Can sync your Documents, Pictures and Desktop folders in addition to the OneDrive folder, at least on Windows.
Cons:
- Doesn't handle large numbers of files well. Syncing 1000+ 500KB files can take the better part of a day.
- Only downloads to the local machine on demand by default (but you can change this).
As a set-and-forget solution with a little more setup effort, a commercial NAS (think Synology, QNAP, etc) & their software for backing up your PC should work well. Many NAS's have a feature to back up your NAS (or a portion of your data) to a friends NAS - and they can back up their data on yours. Buy one for youself and your parents/grandparents, and then you all have offsite backups for the family photos. LTT has a good demo of this, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpxBmxj5mP0
I think there is a minimum level of computer proficiency needed to utilise a backup solution. So many people don't understand the concept of files and folders, or a filesystem, and I imagine the managing backups would be a stretch for them, unless they spent some time learning about these concepts. If a university student can't understand that their work is saved in a folder and not in Word, they're going to have a hell of a time trying to use OneDrive.