Using mobile for backups

MyRealNameToo

goodValue said:

Does an automatic backup system have a great advantage over doing it manually?

It seems to have the disadvantage that it completely takes up one of your USB ports.

Automatic backup has the advantage that you dont have to remember to do it and if you use something like OneDrive, iCloud, Dropbox etc the backups are continuous so were you to have a hard drive failure you've lost at most a minute or twos stuff. 

The other consideration is how you back it up, with decent backup software or online services it will store multiple versions of files whereas if you do all the backup fully manually you typically will be overwriting the old version with the new version. If you then come to try to open a file and find its corrupted the file is then lost whereas a decent back up allows you to pickup the version from the prior backup which is still fine. 

We arent always just talking about files becoming corrupted etc, if you are working on a document or complex spreadsheet you can also realise you've messed it up and so may want to restore a previous backup version rather than trying to unwind the changes you made. 

goodValue

Only takes up a port whilst backing up, leave it in and it can be trashed by the latest ransomeware

I was thinking of those systems that backup as you change/add files.
Are you saying that those that are used online (rather than an app that you had downloaded) are more susceptible to hacking than other online systems?

goodValue

The other consideration is how you back it up, with decent backup software or online services it will store multiple versions of files

Is there any standard as to how many versions of a file is stored.
For example, if you have 10GB to backup, and know that up to 10 versions of a file are stored, then you will need storage of 100GB.

if you do all the backup fully manually you typically will be overwriting the old version with the new version.

I was vaguely aware of this problem, and thought it could be got around by recycling multiple versions.
eg Make a complete backup once a week for a month (you would have 4 backup versions).
Then you would start overwriting these backups the next month.
This would only require 4 times the amount of storage you want to backup.
Of course, depending on how fast your files change, you may need to backup more often than once a week.