Offsite backup is really important to keep your files available to you. I’m going to assume you already have a backup on a USB drive at your desk - if not, Time Machine is well worth investigating - but have you considered how you get your data back in scenarios like these:
- You’re burgled, and the backup drive is stolen along with your computer.
- Lightning strike causes a power surge which fries your machine and the connected drive.
- There’s a fire or flood and you lose your computer and the drive.
Clearly, there are risks that the connected drive doesn’t protect against. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t bother with it, but it probably shouldn’t be your only backup. Here are some others approaches to consider.
Clone
Straightforward, really useful, but manual.
You can use a clone tool, e.g. Macrium Reflect for PC, or SuperDuper/Carbon Copy Cloner for Mac to make a bootable clone of your drive(s) on a USB3 external drive, and leave it at someone else’s house who you visit often.
You need to set yourself reminders to update it frequently, monthly at least, weekly is much better. Manual offsite backup isn’t ideal because it’s so easy to forget to keep it updated, but this is just a tool to get you working again quickly, as the clone you make is bootable. When you lose a drive right before a deadline, you can put off fixing everything until you’ve cleared the decks.
For emphasis, this isn’t enough on its own.
Cloud Backup Service
Straightforward, automatic, frequent and ‘unlimited’.
You can use a cloud backup tool like Backblaze (Mac/PC) which takes a backup of your system and updates it really frequently, say every hour, though the frequency is up to you. After you’ve lost data and you’ve got a new machine and booted from your clone, this is where you can get all your files which have changed since you last updated the clone. Set up is as simple as downloading their client and telling it what to backup and how frequently to update it, and let it go. The first backup will take time, but if you need to stop and restart it for any reason, the client will handle that for you. Once the first backup’s done, it just makes incremental updates to that.
Best practice from a security point of view would be to encrypt your data using a key of your choosing on the client side, which Backblaze supports. If you do choose to do that, you do need to keep that key really safe and again, offsite.
The main downside of Backblaze (and similar services) is that it only keeps files you delete for 30 days, but beside that it’s unlimited storage for $5/month or $50/year.
Your Own Cloud Account Backup
Geeky, automatic, encrypted client side with unlimited past versions.
You can use a tool like Arq (Mac only, Though the developer seems to be working on a Windows version) or one of these similar products to backup to a personal bucket in Amazon S3 (3 cents/GB/Month), Glacier (1 cent/GB/Month), or Google Drive ($10/TB/Month).
Google becomes cheaper than Amazon if you store near to one of its price bands(100GB, 1TB, 10TB, 20TB), but Amazon is probably more convenient as you get charged for your exact usage, not for a bunch of unused space.
My Choices
I’m backing up about 130GB of crucial data to the cloud, predominantly photos and videos, but documents, music and code as well. Wedding and baby photos make me really cautious about backup, but other files are really important to me too, like my code for PicPrints and all my paperless document storage. I use a MacBook Pro, and regularly work at home and the office on it, so I’m not always in the same place as my backups. I also have the benefit of 70Mbit fibre broadband at home.
I keep two Time Machine backups which I plug in whenever I’m at my desk at home or at work, and a SuperDuper clone which I keep at work.
I use Arq to backup everything to a combination of S3 and Glacier, and pay around $1.30/month at present, so for me, it’s much cheaper than Backblaze. I also get the benefit that any files I mistakenly delete will be held indefinitely in my backup - you don’t know that you’ll notice that mistake within 30 days.
Backup doesn’t have to cost a lot or be difficult to set up and keep going like it did 5-10 years ago. It’s well worth investing some time to get it going, and then next time you have a computer problem, you won’t be panicking about losing your valuable data.