The Ultimate Backup Guide: Saving, Syncing and Sharing Your Digital Life: Location Independent Series, #3

By Jeff Blum

*** NEW EDITION: UPDATED MAY 2023 ***
You've probably been hearing a lot about data backup these days, thanks to the increasing popularity of services like Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, Carbonite, etc. This guide—the result of months of research and writing—will cover all of those and much more.

While at first glance backup seems like a straightforward topic, it can be complicated by the following common situations:

• Having more data than you can fit on your computer
• Using multiple computers that need access to the same files
• Making some files accessible on the Web for times when you can't use your own computer
• Syncing and accessing some files with your mobile devices (phones, tablets)
• Protecting yourself from a major system crash, theft or disaster
• Keeping copies of different versions of some files
• Syncing or backing up only selected files instead of everything

My goal is to help you understand everything you need to know about protecting your data with backups. I will also show you how to sync your files across all your computing devices and how to share selected files or collaborate with others.

At its core, this is a technology guide, but securing your digital data is about more than just technology. Thus, I will provide a unique framework to help you organize and more easily work with your data. You will learn how to match different techniques to different data types and hopefully become more productive in the process.

I have tried to make this guide complete, which means it must appeal to the tech-savvy and technophobe alike. Thus, you will read—in simple terms—about the different types of backup (full, incremental, differential, delta), cloud services, how to protect your files with encryption, the importance of file systems when working with different types of computers, permanently assigning drive letters to external drives, and other useful tips.

In many sections of the guide I present a fairly complete listing of backup and syncing tools and services. I do this to be thorough and for those who may have special needs or an above-average interest in the topic. However, I recognize you will most likely be more interested in personal suggestions than a full listing of choices which will require time to investigate. Accordingly, I highlight the tools I have used and recommend. Moreover, I lay out my complete backup and syncing system, which you are free to copy if it suits you.

Note: I am a Windows user and this bias shows in parts of the guide. Most of the concepts are independent of operating system, and many of the recommended programs are available for Macs as well as Windows, but some details (e.g., the discussion of Windows Libraries) and some highlighted software and services, are Windows-only. I think if you are a Mac user you are already used to this common bias, but I want to make it clear before you decide to read this guide.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jeff Blum
• Release date: May 20, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215014080

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List of External Links

external links

liseries.com/backup/

Preface

You may have heard about backup services like Carbonite, Dropbox, Google Drive, and Microsoft OneDrive. This guide—the result of months of research and writing—will cover those and much more.

My goal is to help you understand everything you need to know about protecting your data with backups. I will also show you how to sync your files across all your computing devices and how to share selected files or collaborate with others.

At its core, this is a technology guide, but securing your digital data is about more than just technology. Thus, I will provide a framework to help you organize and more easily work with your data. You will learn how to match different techniques to different data types and hopefully become more productive in the process.

I have tried to make this guide complete, which means it must appeal to the tech-savvy and technophobe alike. Thus, you will read—in simple terms—about the different types of backups (full, incremental, differential, delta), cloud services, how to protect your files with encryption, the importance of file systems when working with different types of computers, permanently assigning drive letters to external drives, and other useful tips.

In some sections of the guide, I list backup and syncing tools and services. I do this to be thorough and for those who may have special needs or an above-average interest in the topic. However, I recognize you will likely be more interested in personal suggestions than a full listing of choices which will require time to investigate. Accordingly, I highlight the tools I have used and recommend. Moreover, I lay out my complete backup and syncing system, which you are free to copy if it suits you.

Introduction

We all know how important it is to back up our digital files, but the majority of us do it neither regularly nor as well as we should. And, while at first glance backup seems like a straightforward topic, it can be complicated by the following common situations:

having more data than you can fit on your computer;

using multiple devices that need access to the same files;

making some files accessible online (possibly as shared files);

protecting yourself from a major system crash, theft or disaster;

keeping copies of different versions of some files; and

syncing or backing up only selected files instead of everything.

In the end, backup is essentially about productivity and risk mitigation. Just like insurance, backup strategies come with a price. The more you mitigate risk, the more you have to spend in terms of time, effort, and money. One useful way to think about things is to consider how you might wish to restore your data in the following circumstances.

You deleted something you need or made a change you regret.

Your hard drive crashed.

Your house burned down.

Facing situations such as these, combined with the dizzying array of programs and services on the market today, forces you to think more carefully about how you protect your digital life. Fortunately, I have spent a lot of time researching all things backup, and in this guide, I will share with you everything I have learned.

Attention Mac Users: I am a Windows guy and this guide is mostly written from a Windows perspective, though much of the content is of value regardless of which operating system you use and I have tried to include Mac-compatible software options.

Defining Terms: Backup, Archiving, Synchronization (Sync) and RAID

A good place to start is the difference between backup and archiving. Backup should be reserved for files that you are modifying. You back them up regularly to a storage medium so that if something unintended happens to them you can recover most of your work. Archiving, on the other hand, is meant for static files that you are not working on and that do not change. You may still wish to have ready access to these files on your computer, but they need not be part of your regular backup plan, thus decreasing the size and duration of your regular backup activity.

Another important distinction is between backup and synchronization (sync).

Backup programs perform file replication in one direction only, usually from an active device to a physical storage device or to online cloud storage. Generally, there are three backup options. A full backup will copy everything from the source collection to the destination, regardless of what is already in the destination or of any changes made since the last backup. Incremental and differential backups refer to only backing up changed files rather than every file. These two terms are often used interchangeably, though technically they are different. Both do a full backup the first time. Each time after, a differential backup looks at all files that have changed since the last full backup while an incremental backup considers any files that have changed since the last backup, even if it was differential or incremental. Usually, an incremental backup will overwrite older versions of a file whereas a differential backup will create special folders to store just the changed files.

Tip: When thinking about full, incremental and differential backups, you might naturally wonder when you need to do a full backup. Ask Leo does a good job discussing the question,¹ but a short answer is performing a full backup once a month and partial (differential or incremental) backups daily is probably a good system.

A key aspect of all backup software is the restore function, which helps you retrieve your backup files. With a full or incremental backup, you will restore from one full set of files. With a differential backup, you will typically first restore the original full backup and then select (by date) which differential backup you wish to restore, which will then overwrite the respective files from the original restore.

Technically speaking, synchronization is a two-way file replication, though in practice many sync programs offer one-way options and other features that mimic or include regular backup functions. Since synchronization programs and services are generally more complex, it is a good idea to be familiar with the following commonly offered features.

Compare. A backup program will compare the files in two different locations only in incremental or differential mode whereas syncing programs always do a comparison.

Copy. New files are always copied in one direction when syncing, but oftentimes the option to copy new files in both directions is also offered.

Delete. While backup-only programs don’t delete files, for sync programs the question is whether a file that has been deleted in the source will be deleted in the destination. If not, a term like copy or update is commonly used. If so, the term mirror is commonly used. In two-way equalization options, files generally aren’t deleted.

Change. What becomes of files that have changed? The most common option is to overwrite the destination file with the source file, though these days more programs, especially the cloud services, allow you to save older files as versioned copies before overwriting.

Conflicts. What happens when a file has been changed on both the source and the destination collection since the last time the sync was run? Usually, these conflicts are displayed but no action is taken. Sometimes you can define rules for how to handle such conflicts, for example, always using the most recent.

Restore. Sync programs don’t typically offer a restore function, though you can often accomplish the same thing via other methods, including the use of a versioning feature when offered.

One feature sometimes, though rarely, offered in both backup and sync programs, is delta file replication (aka, block-level copy). Normally, regardless of what method is used to decide which files will get replicated, the entire file is used. A delta backup or sync, in contrast, will only back up the portions of a file that have changed rather than the entire file. This can be very useful for backing up very large files and for doing very frequent or real-time syncing.

You may come across the term RAID² (Redundant Array of Independent Disks). The most important thing to know about RAID is that it is not, in fact, a backup concept or strategy, though it is sometimes confused as one and it is sometimes part of a larger backup plan.

If RAID is not a backup concept, what is it? While the details can get a bit complicated, it is a system to provide resiliency, performance, and capacity in a computer system. It’s probably easiest to think of RAID as providing redundancy; if one disk fails, other drive(s) in an array take over until the failed drive is replaced. While redundancy is the main benefit of a RAID array, it is also one of the negatives because, in the case of data corruption, the corrupted data is written to all drives on the array. Likewise, deleted files on one drive will be lost on the other drives as well. That is because RAID doesn’t offer common backup technology benefits such as versioning. So, while RAID can be a part of a backup plan, it cannot, by itself, serve as a complete solution.

In the rest of the material, I will try to be specific with my terminology when it is important to understanding, but I may occasionally use replication, backup, or sync as a general term to include all aspects of file replication.

Local, Remote and Cloud Storage

In thinking about our options for backup and sync we will have to consider storage destination as well as technology. The three main options are local, remote, and cloud. Local refers to a storage medium—usually an external hard drive or another computer—that is in physical proximity to the source data. Remote—also referred to as networked—is the same as local but is physically removed from the source data. Cloud³ generally refers to remote storage that is controlled or maintained by a third party, and is often (though not necessarily) distributed across multiple machines and/or locations.

Different Backup Options

I have explained some key terminology and the common types of storage media, so now let’s consider the different backup options at your disposal.

A full disk clone is a backup of your entire computer, including not just your personal files but all the operating system files and software programs you have installed. The backup is usually saved as a single file (a disk image⁴) that can be used to reinstall the system on your existing computer or a new computer.

Backup programs come with many different features but the general goal is to do a one-way copy (usually with versioning)