When I speak of backup, I mean data backup from computers and mobile devices. I will explain the reason for backup, why I am qualified to have a backup strategy and what that strategy is.
People need multiple copies of their important data because hardware fails. Hard drives will crash, computers will hang and lock up and phones will break, get stolen and lock up. If there is only one copy of data on a broken phone, then that data is lost. A friend of mine had a new son and took close to 3,000 photos and then his phone was stolen. Since that was the only location of those photos, they were lost. Add to hardware failures the increased prevalence of ransomware and malware. Ransomware is when a piece of software encrypts everything on your hard drive and you cannot get to your data without paying money. Recently hospitals and universities were hit with the ransomware wanna cry, and had to pay. Malware will get into your connects list and copy all the personal data and send it to someone. Then your data is corrupted.
Before I was a pastor I was a computer programmer. I worked at Seagate, Western Digital and Miniscribe. These are hard drive companies. I wrote software to test hard drives and prove their longevity. A certain abbreviation became the standard for how hard drives worked: PRML, which means “partial read, maximum likelihood.” Hard drive electronics are now smart and they are guessing at what they are reading on your hard drive. Hard drives can get confused, can overwrite data, and break and can lose data. SSDs are not any better. SSDs rely 100% on the electronics to read and write correctly. Get a bit too hot and all bets are off. So I use hard drives, but I do not trust them. , therefore, I backup.
My strategy is simple: have multiple copies of everything. 3 copies for replaceable things and 5 Drobo raid array. A Drobo is a box with multiple hard drives. The software in a Drobo create multiple copies of the data internally, so if one hard drive dies, no data is lost. I can boot off the Drobo if needed and get back up instantly. The oldest backup on the Drobo is 24 hours old. I also backup to a USB drive from Western Digital. It is a single drive and it is cloned every night. I use this if I have to grab a backup and run. If I am in the building and it catches fire, I can grab this and get out. I can plug it into any Mac and boot and work. The Drobo is unwieldy, so hard to grab. I also do a weekly backup to a drive I take out and place in my car. So if I am away and the church burns down, I have a copy of my data in my car and can rebuild from a backup that is, at most, a week old. I have a Synology NAS RAID at the church. It backs everything up via the network. It is in a different room than my iMac. It copies its backups, over the internet, to another Synology at my house, creating an instant off site backup. The network traffic from the Synology is fully encrypted. The benefit of the Synology is that it cannot be infected with ransomware or malware. Their software prevents it.
copies of mission critical data. My main work computer is an iMac with a three terabyte drive. It clones itself every night to a
I automatically backup my phone and tablet to my iMac using a free program called iMazing Mini. It creates a data file on my computer, which is then backed up to the various places I have mentioned. So I can restore my phone and tablet if they are lost, stolen or broken, fairly quickly to a condition that is less than 24 hours old.
These are the hard drives I control. I also copy data to cloud services. The mission critical church files, like sermon notes and studies and things I create like that are backed up to Dropbox every hour. My entire computer is backup up to a service called BackBlaze every moment of every day. Every change is sent over the internet to their servers. Dropbox and BackBlaze are secure and spread out, so I trust them to keep my data safe. I used to copy everything to Amazon AWS every night, but that got too expensive. So I backup to five “local” destinations that I control and to two cloud services. I feel very confident that I will not lose any data. Even if a meteor hits, it can’t get everything.
#Backup Strategy#
People need multiple copies of their important data because hardware fails. Hard drives will crash, computers will hang and lock up and phones will break, get stolen and lock up. If there is only one copy of data on a broken phone, then that data is lost. A friend of mine had a new son and took close to 3,000 photos and then his phone was stolen. Since that was the only location of those photos, they were lost. Add to hardware failures the increased prevalence of ransomware and malware. Ransomware is when a piece of software encrypts everything on your hard drive and you cannot get to your data without paying money. Recently hospitals and universities were hit with the ransomware wanna cry, and had to pay. Malware will get into your connects list and copy all the personal data and send it to someone. Then your data is corrupted.
Before I was a pastor I was a computer programmer. I worked at Seagate, Western Digital and Miniscribe. These are hard drive companies. I wrote software to test hard drives and prove their longevity. A certain abbreviation became the standard for how hard drives worked: PRML, which means “partial read, maximum likelihood.” Hard drive electronics are now smart and they are guessing at what they are reading on your hard drive. Hard drives can get confused, can overwrite data, and break and can lose data. SSDs are not any better. SSDs rely 100% on the electronics to read and write correctly. Get a bit too hot and all bets are off. So I use hard drives, but I do not trust them. , therefore, I backup.
My strategy is simple: have multiple copies of everything. 3 copies for replaceable things and 5 Drobo raid array. A Drobo is a box with multiple hard drives. The software in a Drobo create multiple copies of the data internally, so if one hard drive dies, no data is lost. I can boot off the Drobo if needed and get back up instantly. The oldest backup on the Drobo is 24 hours old. I also backup to a USB drive from Western Digital. It is a single drive and it is cloned every night. I use this if I have to grab a backup and run. If I am in the building and it catches fire, I can grab this and get out. I can plug it into any Mac and boot and work. The Drobo is unwieldy, so hard to grab. I also do a weekly backup to a drive I take out and place in my car. So if I am away and the church burns down, I have a copy of my data in my car and can rebuild from a backup that is, at most, a week old. I have a Synology NAS RAID at the church. It backs everything up via the network. It is in a different room than my iMac. It copies its backups, over the internet, to another Synology at my house, creating an instant off site backup. The network traffic from the Synology is fully encrypted. The benefit of the Synology is that it cannot be infected with ransomware or malware. Their software prevents it. copies of mission critical data. My main work computer is an iMac with a three terabyte drive. It clones itself every night to a
I automatically backup my phone and tablet to my iMac using a free program called iMazing Mini. It creates a data file on my computer, which is then backed up to the various places I have mentioned. So I can restore my phone and tablet if they are lost, stolen or broken, fairly quickly to a condition that is less than 24 hours old.
These are the hard drives I control. I also copy data to cloud services. The mission critical church files, like sermon notes and studies and things I create like that are backed up to Dropbox every hour. My entire computer is backup up to a service called BackBlaze every moment of every day. Every change is sent over the internet to their servers. Dropbox and BackBlaze are secure and spread out, so I trust them to keep my data safe. I used to copy everything to Amazon AWS every night, but that got too expensive. So I backup to five “local” destinations that I control and to two cloud services. I feel very confident that I will not lose any data. Even if a meteor hits, it can’t get everything.
#Backup Strategy#
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