Confession time: I read a lot of the posts here and think, “What am I missing?”
Do I really need to have a Synology server that takes incremental backups every day, a Backblaze account, and a portable hard drive for Time Machine that I swap out with an identical one stored off site at my brother’s house?
Is it really necessary for me to routinely export all my writing from Ulysses and Bear and store it in plain text files “just in case”?
For context, I own a small business similar to @MacSparky’s. It’s me and my husband, and the occasional contractor, and we create digital training products. Think video, audio, text, and lots of live webinars.
Most of my work is writing. I probably spend 50% or more of my time creating content of some kind, and never, ever do I worry that the app I’m writing in (typically Ulysses, but sometimes Bear) isn’t “future proof” or that my content is “locked in” to a proprietary database.
I guess the way I see it, nothing that I’m creating is going to cure cancer or facilitate world peace. If it’s lost, life–even mine–will go on. So I use the tools I like and don’t spend any time worrying about potential data loss or future access.
FWIW, I do backup my business’s sales and financial data. A catastrophic loss of our web server a few years ago taught me that lesson. But that’s really the only thing that, to me, is irreplaceable.
So tell me. What AM I missing? Because I’m sure it’s something.
Redundant backups are necessary in case you lose your original. Three-two-one is the thumbrule: Three copies of your data, on at least two different media, one offsite.
Three copies are necessary because if one of your backups fails, you’d still have your original and a backup.
Two different media to reduce the likelihood of failure.
One offsite in case your business is subject to a fire or other disaster.
I’ve known small business owners who lost their data. The loss was devastating. One or two of them lost their business entirely. It was, to them, as bad as if their entire place of business had burned down, with all their equipment and assets, and they had been uninsured. They lost years of work, and the financial assets and customer loyalty that they had built over that time.
As to why you want your data to be future-proof: What if Ulysses goes out of business or cancels your subscription arbitrarily?
Just a few days ago, I heard from a friend who was keeping all her business records in a popular subscription notes service. She was locked out of her account through no fault of her own. She is, to use the technical language, screwed.
Maybe nothing. Only you can decide. But think on this. I’ve known people who had their entire lives totally messed up by loss of records of important things like adoptions and divorces and marriages that cost considerable time, energy and money to recover and deal with the fallout. If you lose all your business records of your customers, finances and cannot access them how long will it take to rebuild it? If you bank goes under or folds do you have proof of what you had in the bank to provide the data to regulators to recover lost funds? Do you have any genealogical data that would be of interest to your descendants? Have you ever bred any livestock or owned registered animals?
I’ve been collecting and using information that I gathered on computers for over 25 years. This represents a rich and useful archive for me and I refer to numerous pieces of it daily. I also have experienced data loss of critical items that were not there when I went back and needed them. I stand in a line of shepherds that goes back 10 thousand years or more. The actions and things I document and do now affect the genetic diversity for generations to come. I want those decisions and the reasons for them and the basic information to survive me and be available to those that come after. When things were written on clay tablets, or on papyrus scrolls or parchment books they could become lost or damaged but many would survive. Digital data is ephemeral. It can be gone in an instant and a life’s work is gone too. I’m currently using information that was documented by shepherds in the 1600’s and survived only in a few Abbey records. I’ve learned interesting things with recent DNA analysis of our sheep flock that other people will need to know about in the future. For me maintaining access to all that information is part of my job.
I also handle converting digital records to newer formats and technologies on a regular basis. The WORM drives we did the first archiving on are no longer viable storage. The drives themselves will not work with modern computers. Gold writeable CD-ROMS are subject to corrosion worms that destroy data, BTDT but fortunately had backups. The data I originally collected and saved on 8 inch floppy drives is still in my system because I made a point of moving it along as each new technology came about. Other wise it would be lost completely.
Some of the most interesting historical books I love to read are the everyday diaries and notes from ordinary people. You may not think you have anything worth saving but I bet you really do.
As I noted elsewhere, archiving and backup are two different approaches to storing content. Archiving is putting away a completed work that you have no intent to change. Backing up is storing incremental copies of work that you are still editing.
Future proofing archives is assuring that everyone who should read the archived work in the format and layout that you created can do so exactly in the format and layout that you created for them to see it at all future times (to infinity and beyond). You future proof archives by using a storage format that has been standardized today to remain immutable for all foreseeable future, be darned that the tools exist in that future world. In simple terms, a 1 cm hex nut is standardized in format. Should all public 1 cm wrenches disappear at some date, someone who knows the standards can still recreate their own private tool to open all 1 cm hex nuts. Absent a requisite future-proof standard, a 1.000001 cm hex nut fails to be future proof, even when a public 1.000001 cm hex-nut-opener tool exists in the future but no 1 cm hex-nut-opener tools exist.
Future proofing backups is assuring that you retain viable options to read and edit content that is stored in the backup over your lifetime. How to go beyond your lifetime in strategies to future proof backups is anyone’s guess. Perhaps at least use two different backup formats.
Otherwise, you seem to have experience to put a good handle on the time periods that you should set to make backups (daily, weekly, … routinely) and the hardware that you should use to store them (external drives, cloud drives, … and others).
Hope this helps put “future proofing” in an understandable light.
From business experience helping others with their accounts (I’m an independent computer technician):
Always keep your recovery information current throughout your accounts.
Pay special attention to email accounts and banking information.
Store as many different pieces of recovery information as the account will let you. You never know when the account service will render a recovery information type invalid (landline), through no fault of your own.
If you’ll allow me to be a little bit blunt, think of it this way. Somebody walks into your office, and erases everything on your computer. Are you saying that would have no practical effect on you?
If so, why don’t you go do it now? I’ll wait.
I’m assuming you had a reason that you don’t want to do that - and your answer to that question is why you probably want better backups than you have now. Even if it only costs you time re-making content, that’s worth something, isn’t it?
That said, what you’re reacting negatively to is what I’d call a “paranoid” backup strategy. And there’s a world of difference between a basic backup strategy and a paranoid backup strategy. The good news is that if you currently have nothing, you can do a lot better for very little money.
If you don’t have anything else, and you don’t think you need backups at all, I’d suggest you just go one step further. Sign up for Backblaze and you’ll be covered for the situations you didn’t think of. Turn it on, and have it back up your whole computer. Pay the extra couple bucks for 1-year retention, and call it good.
Your future self will likely be very happy that you did at some point.
By this standard, I do have (probably) adequate backups, between a local Time Machine and a cloud provider. I have been that business owner who lost critical data and hand to piece it together from credit card statements and PayPal charges. That said, I’m not obsessive about it.
If I were the caretaker of this kind of information, I would for sure be more careful about keeping multiple backups and future proofing my records.
This is a useful distinction. Thanks!
This is a good tip, and something I need to do a better job of. Thanks for the reminder.
Yes, that’s it exactly. To clarify, I do have basic backups, just not the number and variety that I see described here so often. That’s what made me think I must be missing something.
Time Machine plus Backblaze is a great baseline and completely hands off.
It’s what protects the majority of my stuff. But for my DSLR photos — 18 years of them — I have Time Machine plus Backblaze plus an offsite archive.
The latter came about when one day I found that a migration from either Lightroom to Aperture or the other way had resulted in me losing 3 months worth of photos — a fact I did not discover until years later when no regular backup was any use! Fortunately, I found a one off backup I’d made before migrating to a new Mac and found them there.
Do you need all those things? Probably not
Do you need a backup in case something happens? Yes @webwalrus already gave that scenario.
Is it possible to become ‘paranoid’ and ‘obsessed’? Definitely. yes, especially if you’ve been burnt in the past for not having a proper backup to begin with and things go up in digital flame.
I think I have multiple posts about Synology and backups, could it be simpler? Yes. However, other than just my own personal projects, family photos over the decades, family historian, I also oversee other libraries and projects that I am involved in which need a proper backup.
An example: I think I mentioned a few months ago I was involved in a Digital Library of organizing massive (TBs) of PDFs…I am not as involved anymore and pulled back. Why? The group collectively feels that storing everything (the only copy) on OneDrive or Google Drive is sufficient. No need for more trauma in my life.
At the end of the day, what is precious and important to you? Time.
It depends on your personal tech-savviness and aversion to risk. I personally don’t have a complicated backup schema, apart from copying my files to an external SSD from time to time. For regular use, evertying is in iCloud Drive, and that’s all.
I could lose access to iCloud Drive (most probably due to having my email account stolen, or being unable to pay Apple), but my hard drive would still be there. My house could be destroyed in a fire, but I would still have everything in iCloud Drive. I consider the probability of the two events happening at the same time to be too remote. Apart from that, I consider myself to be safe from operational errors like removing a folder by mistake.
But that’s just me, because I believe the hassle of setting up a more comprehensive sstrategy takes time, costs money, and is inconvenient.
I am the one who doesn’t do much backup. In the past I had an external drive just because the storage in my computer was not enough (due to many photos). A few years ago I accidentally had a little bit water splashing on the keyboard of my MacBook Air, checked by Apple thankfully no damage but I decided to upload all my photos to Apple Photos. I am happy with the decision even though you can say there can be cloud issues, but in that way I can always find my photos much easier.
I just sync some important documents and Apple Notes on my iCloud. I did try to use plain text to write my documents and take notes but it is not for me, and I don’t want the so-called future proof to sacrifice my experience of using especially creating, writing, sketching and thinking something (and that’s why I sometimes choose to do on paper), as well as easy to be searched and revisited, and not all my content is needed to be stored. I just need to export those I regard as important as other formats like plain text or PDF.
For the reasons I sometimes use paper because it can let me better quick capture something like people who can come and go in seconds. Paper and pen are always faster than iPad, although you will need time to scan them for backup. But you won’t avoid paper because paper is not future proof (can be lost, stolen, burnt, paper becoming yellowed and eaten by bookworms…).
Are you using the cloud provider to sync or to back up? They’re two different things. Syncing gives you some protection, but unlike a backup it will potentially replicate deletion or corruption across all your devices.
I backup to Backblaze B2, to a local APFS SSD, and also to a local ExFAT SSD (my next of kin has never used a Mac). I keep a minimum of 2 years of backups and I routinely restore and test a few files to verify my backups are good.
I’ve never had enough data to need a NAS which, if accessible from the Internet, comes with its own set of responsibilities/vulnerabilities.
Future proofing my data and storage media is something I do occasionally (I retired my Zip drive several years ago). And I check with some experts from time to time to keep up with their recommendations.
It sounds like you have backups of your working Mac covered.
I have found it useful to also have an archive of my Mac. This has saved me a lot of work in one case and in another gave me access to something that was irreplaceable.
For me, an archive is simply a clone of my Mac taken within the last year or so. It gives me a swift way to recover files if something dramatic happened (or dramatically stupid, in my case) within the last year. Usually I make these clones right before a major system update.
But that aside, I would say the one thing you are missing is periodically checking that those backups are accessible. That means knowing how to recover a lost file (learning the interface of Time Machine, Backblaze, etc.) and proving that, at least for that one file, the backup is intact (no hardware failure, no data corruption). There are other ways to check the integrity of backups, but for me the bare minimum is restoring a file or two a few times a year.
Hardly anyone talks about checking their backups. But please don’t leave learning your file recovery until you’re in panic mode!
I have in effect three copies of my data - on my laptop, on a sync service (iCloud or Obsidian Sync) and on an external drive (TimeMachine).
I feel this covers most eventualities - things get deleted, I’ve TimeMachine going back many months. Fire at home, I’ve the copy on the sync service.
One thing I’m not entirely clear about is how TimeMachine backs up things on iCloud that aren’t fully downloaded to my Mac - for example photographs or files. Apple’s documentation seems to suggest that it DOES fetch copies which are then offloaded to the cloud (e.g., Back up the library in Photos on Mac – Apple Support (UK)), but forums seem to be in disagreement - for example where the local copy of photographs are lower quality copies.
This is great advice. I worked for a company (a long time ago) which lost weeks of the entire finance department’s data after a system failure because the backup had silently failed.
Lock-in very well may not be a big deal for many businsesses.
But losing the work product that you spend > 50% of your time creating would not be a big deal? That seems really hard for me to believe for any business.
Both. All documents are synced with Dropbox to both my laptops as well as my husband’s laptop. I also periodically upload important documents to AWS for long-term archiving.
That’s a good point, and I’m happy to say that I have recovered files from time to time, so all is good there!
Everything I’ve ever published lives on the internet somewhere. My website, YouTube, Vimeo, Apple Podcasts, etc. The only thing that would be lost if, for example, Ulysses went away, would be the drafts of that content and some (mostly useless) ramblings that haven’t yet become something publishable.
