How to Not Lose All of Your Data: Backups for Beginners

What would you do if you suddenly lost all of the photos you’ve taken in the past 20 years? Or perhaps your term paper that’s due tomorrow? Or maybe that text file that you keep all of your passwords in? If you’ve never had it happen to you, you might not really think about how the tech that we use every day can sometimes fail catastrophically. What works perfectly fine one day might be completely broken the next, whether it’s due to water damage, old age, or just dropping it down the stairs. Oh, and don’t forget about hackers and thieves, either! Or even the possibility of you just… accidentally deleting stuff. Yeah, we’ve all done it.

So how can you make sure that you never lose your data, even when the worst case scenario happens? You make backups!

What is a backup?

In the simplest form, a backup is just a copy of whatever data you care about, preferably on a different device/media. After all, there’s not much point in keeping a copy of your data on the same device, because then you’re hosed if that device breaks! Instead, you would probably want your second copy someone else, such as:

• On a USB flash drive or external hard drive
• In the cloud, e.g. Google Drive, Dropbox, or iCloud

Do I need backups?

For most people, the data that is most likely to be lost is “local” data, i.e. data that is stored directly on your computer or phone (such as a Word document or a photo album). This is because that data can be lost if that device breaks or is lost/stolen. You can even get malware that erases your data or holds it for ransom unless you pay a fee to get it back.

So naturally, the best way to prevent that kind of data loss is to simply store the data elsewhere! And the easiest way to do that is with a cloud service!

Now it’s worth noting that many of the apps we use these days are already cloud services by nature, and this often means that the data is already safe, even if you somehow manage to snap your device cleanly in half. So you may not need to make traditional backups at all if you only use cloud services, such as:

• Google Docs for documents
• Google Photos/iCloud for photos/videos
• Google Calendar for scheduling
• Spotify/Pandora/iTunes for music/podcasts
• Discord/Telegram/Whatsapp/Facebook Messenger/iMessage for chat
• Any other services that you can access through a web browser

Indeed, simply using a cloud service is probably the easiest way for most of the population to ensure that they never lose access to their data… at least until the company goes out of business or stops providing service to you. If you want a reality check, consider the case of Picturelife, which famously shut down and left users with no hope of recovering their photo albums.

Imagine randomly losing all of your wedding photos and home movies one day because some algorithm decided to terminate your account.

If that’s not a concern for you, then more power to you. Maybe you only use large, established providers like Google, Apple, and Amazon, and they’re likely to continue operating for decades. But what if you forget/lose your account password? Or what if your account gets taken over by a hacker? Or what if your whole Google account gets shut down for no reason? And it’s not limited to just Google either; pretty much any company can decide to stop doing business with you at any time. Imagine randomly losing all of your wedding photos and home movies one day because some algorithm decided to terminate your account.

So then what’s the answer to the question? As it turns out, the answer is yes.

Yes, you should always have a backup of anything important!

It’s that simple.

So then what should I do?

If local data isn’t safe, and cloud data isn’t safe, then where the heck should you keep it? The answer: Keep it in both places. They’re unsafe for different reasons, after all, and those reasons are generally not related. A cloud provider is unlikely to terminate your account or go out of business on the same day that you lose your phone or your house burns down.

So the best advice I can give is this:

• Back up all local data to a cloud service
• Back up all cloud data to a local device (or at least to a different cloud service)

The next two sections will describe how to do just that.

How to back up local data

Backing up local data is a more “traditional” kind of backup. It is also commonly done with USB flash drives and external hard drives, and while this can be cheaper in the long run as compared to cloud backups (which usually have a monthly fee), cloud backups are generally much more user-friendly and can be worth the cost.

Your local data in this case is likely to be any of the following:

• Documents, including PDFs and Word/Excel/PowerPoint files
• Photo albums and videos
• Music collections that are stored as regular files (e.g. NOT in iTunes/Apple Music), such as those downloaded from Bandcamp or ripped from CDs.
• Video game save files, for games that do NOT have cloud saves (most modern games do have them)

The easiest way to back up data like this for most people is to use a cloud service specifically designed for backups and/or syncing. For computers, this means something like Proton Drive, Backblaze, iDrive, Dropbox Backup, or iCloud.

As for your smartphone, chances are that you’re not working with local documents on there very often—most of the data you’re working with is probably already stored in the cloud, because phones don’t usually have the ability to store much data locally. The main thing you’re probably storing is photos and videos, and even then, Androids and iPhones often will back up your photos to the cloud for you via Google Photos and iCloud, respectively. If this works for you, and you’re sure that all of the other data on your phone is already in the cloud (e.g. Google Docs, Spotify playlists, etc.), then you may not need dedicated backups.

But what if some of your data isn’t in the cloud? Many apps don’t store your data in the cloud, especially privacy-focused and/or open-source applications like Signal or Antennapod. If you lose your phone, you’d lose all of your message history and podcast subscriptions.

The good news is that many apps like this have backup and export options in the settings! Signal can back up your entire message history to a file every night, and likewise, Antennapod has an option to export your podcast database. Once the backup files are stored, you have a few options:

• If you have an Android, you can plug the phone into your computer and access it like a USB flash drive; you can just copy the files over to your computer! If you have an iPhone, you can Airdrop them.
• Use any cloud storage service (like Google Drive or Dropbox) to manually upload the backup file.
• Use a backup or file syncing service (again, like Dropbox or iCloud) to automatically upload the backup file to the cloud.

How to back up cloud data

Luckily, many companies allow you to download your cloud data so that you can continue to access it even if your account is terminated, you forget your password, your account gets taken over by a hacker, the company goes out of business, or even if you just stop using them and want to switch to another service. For example, Google Takeout allows you to regularly download all of your photos, emails, and other Google data. You can then store the archive wherever you like as a backup, locally review/edit the data, or upload the data to another cloud service.

If you care about any of your cloud data, then I highly recommend going and making sure that the services you use allow you to download it. If they don’t, consider switching to another service before you get even more “locked in”—the longer you wait, the harder it will get. And if they do let you download it, then go ahead and do it, preferably once every few months at least. Set a reminder in your calendar to do it regularly!

Note that if you use a file-syncing service like DropBox or iCloud that stores your data both locally and in the cloud, then you may not need to specifically download that cloud data anywhere as a backup. However, sometimes these services only keep a portion of your data locally, e.g. your most commonly-used or recently-used files. Take a deeper look at your settings to see how it’s set up. A good way to know for sure whether the data is local is to turn your device on airplane mode and disable the wifi, then see if you can still access the files. If you can, then you’re good! Though be warned—you might still lose the files if you accidentally delete them, so you may still wish to consider using a “traditional” backup service like Backblaze that I mentioned in the previous section. Alternately, double check that your syncing service will “keep previous versions” of files, and keep deleted ones saved for a while too, just in case.

Photos from your phone can be especially tricky to keep backed up if you’re using Google Photos or iCloud, since they can be set to automatically delete old photos off of your phone to save space. They’ll still be in the cloud, and you can still see them in your photos app, but if you ever lose access to the cloud data, then your old photos will be gone forever. To ensure your photos are safe, you have some options:

• Manually copy over your photos from your phone to your computer regularly, before they get deleted off your phone. Again, if you have an Android, you can do this by plugging your phone into your computer and using it like a USB flash drive. If you have an iPhone, you can Airdrop them.
• Regularly download your photos onto a device with more storage (e.g. from the Google Photos website, or with Google Takeout).
• If using file-syncing software like Dropbox or iCloud with both a phone and a computer, you may be able to set it up so that all photos are stored locally on your computer, even if your phone only has room to store the most recent ones.
  • But again, if you go this route, consider using a regular backup service too so that you can protect against accidentally deleting your photos!

Conclusion

I know this has been a long article, so if you want a TL;DR version, here you go:

• If you want to keep your data mostly safe for little effort and cost, just use cloud services (e.g. Google Docs, Google Photos, iCloud, Spotify, etc.) instead of keeping everything on your local devices (phone, laptop, etc.)
• If you have local (non-cloud) data, back it up to the cloud with a service like Proton Drive, Backblaze, iDrive, Dropbox Backup, or iCloud.
• If you want to make sure your cloud data is safe even if your account gets terminated or hacked, the company goes out of business, etc. then export/download your data regularly (if the company offers that option).

I know this all may seem like a hassle for what seems like a rare event, but believe me, if you care about your photos, documents, and music, you’d be heartbroken to lose them. A few hours of research today can really save you tons of trouble down the line. So seriously, take some time this weekend to figure out your backup solution. Your future self will thank you.