Your online services won’t do it for you.
It’s no surprise that we rely on online services (or “the cloud”) more than ever these days. From email to photo sharing and even social media, an amazing amount of information is being shared and stored online.
Sometimes it’s only online, and that’s a problem. Remember, if it’s in only one place, it’s not backed up.
And, no, the cloud services themselves are unlikely to help — particularly the free services.
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Backing up the cloud
Your online data isn’t safe just because it’s in the cloud. Those services back up for themselves, not you! Your data is at risk of hacking, accidental deletion, service shutdowns, and account lockouts. Take responsibility: download your emails, keep original photos, and regularly export important information. Remember, if it’s only in one place, it’s not backed up.
Online providers don’t have your back
“But Leo,” I hear you saying, “Cloud services have backups!”
Indeed they do. It’d be a pretty poor service that doesn’t.
Here’s the deep, dark secret: those backups aren’t for you. Those backups exist to protect the service from issues they experience. They’re almost certainly not there to act as a backup for you.
If the service suffers a catastrophic or even minor problem, they can restore their services from their backups. If you accidentally delete a file or lose access to your account, those backups aren’t going to help you. If you ask, the service will politely tell you that you’re out of luck. If you get an answer at all.
Backing up is your responsibility. I’ll bet that’s even called out in the terms of service. Or, more likely, “it’s not our responsibility” is clearly stated.
We’re on our own.
How vulnerable are you?
Start by taking inventory of what you have online.
- Photos and videos
- Documents
- Music
- Etc.
Anything that you store primarily online is at risk.
At risk of what?
- Account compromise/hacking. Even if you get your account back, everything within it may be deleted.
- Accidental deletion of both accounts and individual files or items. We’ve all said “Oops!”, haven’t we?
- Service shutdown. It happens; I’ve experienced it. Sometimes it comes without warning.
- Provider technical failures. This could be anything from poor internal management to external events taking out data centers.
- Account lockouts. This seems to happen most often when traveling, but it’s possible to get locked out of your online account for many reasons.
How vulnerable are you? Very.
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Backing up email
“But Leo, I hate the cloud. I don’t trust the cloud, and I don’t use the cloud, so none of this applies to me!”
I often hear that kind of reaction via email. You know — email that’s run by online service providers in the cloud. Sorry to say, but as much as you think you’re avoiding the cloud, you’re still soaking in it. And if you’re not backing up your email, you’re risking everything I listed above.
The solution is simple: download and install a desktop email program, configure it to access your email via IMAP, and make sure it’s downloading everything. You can ignore the desktop email program if you like; just make sure it’s running. It’s downloading your email to your PC, which, of course, you’re also backing up, right?
Desktop email clients you can use for this could include:
- Thunderbird (my recommendation, and it’s free)
- Microsoft Outlook (classic, desktop version – the “new” Outlook doesn’t count)
- eM Client
- Apple Mail
- … many others
You might even use one online email service to act as a backup for another. There are also email-specific backup utilities and services.
Backing up other cloud services
There are, of course, a plethora of cloud services providing a variety of features. If you use them, ask yourself how you’re backing up that data.
- Google’s ecosystem (Gmail, Drive, Photos, YouTube)
- Microsoft services (Outlook.com, OneDrive, Office 365)
- Apple services (iCloud, Photos, iWork)
- Photo and video sharing services
- Social media
- Financial and medical records
- Password managers
For these and more, I strongly recommend either of two backup methods, depending on the service being used.
- Never delete an uploaded original. Uploading a photo to social media? Keep the original somewhere on your PC where it’ll get backed up. Uploading a video to YouTube? Again, keep that original1 somewhere local in case your YouTube account goes away. As long as you have the original, you can always recover from online loss.
- Periodically download. Unfortunately, this isn’t as easy to automate as it should be2. As an example, I have a periodic reminder (once a month, in my case) to visit a few of the services I use and explicitly download or export the data that’s been accumulating there. Once again, should that service disappear, it’ll be an inconvenience but not a disaster.
Security and privacy
How do you keep your backups safe?
One of my recommendations is to back up data that’s kept encrypted in non-encrypted form and then secure that backup some other way. That could be physical (based on its location being secure, such as placing a backup copy in a safe) or technological (using a different encryption method to reduce the chances of both encryption mechanisms failing at the same time). If backups are kept online, make sure their storage is appropriately secure.
But the concept is simple: your backups of sensitive data are themselves sensitive data. Treat them that way.
Planning for recovery
Test your backups. A backup that fails when you need it is just as good as no backup at all. I recommend you test any newly created backup scheme soon(ish) after creating it and then periodically thereafter. At home, that might be once a year. For a business, perhaps you’d want to test more often.
Understand that data migration can be lossy. If you take data from one service — contacts from one email provider, for example — and attempt to import them to another, you may find that not all fields or information make the transition. You’ll still have whatever is in that import, of course, but getting the missing pieces into the new destination could take additional effort. Contacts are my most common example, but this can apply to just about anything.
Do you know where your backups are? It’s oh-so-tempting to “set it and forget it” with too much emphasis on the forgetting part. This is particularly crucial for businesses, as the person who “set it” might not be the person who needs it down the road. That means, of course, documenting what you’ve done so you can find what you need when you need it.
Do this
Even if you’re using the cloud — perhaps especially if you’re using the cloud — backing up is your responsibility. There will always be tradeoffs between convenience and protection, but the first time you face a disaster, you’ll get a quick and perhaps brutal assessment of whether or not you did enough and whether it was all worth it.
I’ll leave you with this: it’s usually better to have backed up too much than not enough.
Now, go back up your email.
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Podcast audio
Footnotes & References
1: I recommend keeping the pre-edited original media. You can’t un-crop a photo to get the original back. You can’t un-edit a video to get the original back. So keep those originals before any editing has happened.
2: This is a case where it’s definitely “good to be a geek”. I do have a few things automated via batch files. For instance, once a week, I zip up the contents of the Dropbox used by a nonprofit I support.
not for nothing Leo, but i clicked on that ad at the bottom of your page and it took me to a suspicious place. who vets your ads? the ad was my husband divorced me after seeing this picture.
Ugh. Yes, I have some major changes related to advertising coming up this summer. I don’t vet the current crop, they’re provided by the advertising network I use.
Watch out if you are using IMAP. IMAP doesn’t automatically download all emails to your It syncs with the server and fetches emails as you click on them . I use Thunderbird and this is what I do. (The process is a little different for different email programs.)
Regarding backup of email – MS 365 in particular – what do you think about online services that do this automatically, such as iDrive, Acronis, and even the relatively new Microsoft product? I like to think that they would be better than me at reliably backing up and restoring.