For those who make backups of their PC

JustAnotherSaver

How do you verify a backup, short of going through every single folder & file manually?

And i'm not a fan of cloud storage myself. I guess i'm a little old fashioned in that way - i want to back up to something i can see/touch. Yes these can fail also i know but even still.

thescouselander

No more backups for me - everything is in the cloud these days.

AnotherJoe

JustAnotherSaver wrote: »

How do you verify a backup, short of going through every single folder & file manually?

And i'm not a fan of cloud storage myself. I guess i'm a little old fashioned in that way - i want to back up to something i can see/touch. Yes these can fail also i know but even still.

You should do both. Cloud & local physical.
I do cloud, local always connected physical (both automated), local physical i disconnect after backup.

AnotherJoe

thescouselander wrote: »

No more backups for me - everything is in the cloud these days.

That doesnt fix user error.

Zandoni

Operating system on SSD.
Data on seperate drive.
I rotate three removable drives which I manually backup my data drive on with the free version of Syncback.

John_Gray

Many of the above solutions will not cope with the situation where you are hit by Ransomware, which can encrypt all files which are accessible online on your PC or laptop, including those in the cloud, NAS boxes, USB Flash Drives and hard drives, and so on.

The only solution seem to me to make a backup to a removable device and remove it after the backup.

GunJack

John_Gray wrote: »

Many of the above solutions will not cope with the situation where you are hit by Ransomware, which can encrypt all files which are accessible online on your PC or laptop, including those in the cloud, NAS boxes, USB Flash Drives and hard drives, and so on.

The only solution seem to me to make a backup to a removable device and remove it after the backup.

exactly this ^^^^

nomoneytoday

IMHO as long as your personal letters, serial numbers and pictures etc are backed up, programs can be reloaded, music can be downloaded again from iTunes and Spotify etc.

Johnmcl7

John_Gray wrote: »

Many of the above solutions will not cope with the situation where you are hit by Ransomware, which can encrypt all files which are accessible online on your PC or laptop, including those in the cloud, NAS boxes, USB Flash Drives and hard drives, and so on.

The only solution seem to me to make a backup to a removable device and remove it after the backup.

Cloud storage systems often offer a version history so if your files do get trashed or encrypted by ransomware, you can revert them - for example:

https://www.dropbox.com/en/help/11

It's worth checking the provider offers this features and what limitations it has if being used for backup.

I would like to do a cloud backup but I've only got a 10Mb/s upload and the file sizes I'd want to back up are just too large for that.

John

Johnmcl7

For backing up I have one internal drive for daily backups then I have a separate USB drive I backup monthly to (or more often if I've saved more files to the PC) that I keep separate so if something happens to the PC and I lose the original and backup drives, I've got an entirely separate backup.

My sync software scans the backed up files each time to look for differences so if my backup did get corrupted or had wrong, that would show and it would recopy the files over to replace the damaged ones.

John