Notes
The forty-five minute backup
Fourteen years in IT taught me that a green tick every morning proves nothing. Here is a backup a small shop can build in an afternoon, and the fifteen minutes that prove it works.
Before the café, before the studio, I spent fourteen years in IT, and the last proper job was running the infrastructure for a freight company out in Laverton. We backed up every night. A job kicked off at 2am, wrote to a network drive, and emailed me a green tick when it finished. It sent that tick, without fail, every morning for eighteen months.
Then the drive died in the machine that ran despatch scheduling. I went to restore it, and the backup was four kilobytes. Someone had changed a folder path during an upgrade the previous winter, and the job had been faithfully copying an empty directory ever since. The tick meant the job ran. It did not mean the data was there. Nobody had ever tried to get anything back out.
I think about that morning whenever someone tells me they’re pretty sure they’re backed up. A backup you have never restored from is not a backup. It is a hope with a schedule attached.
Three copies, two places, one you can’t reach
The rule is 3-2-1: three copies of anything you’d hate to lose, on two different kinds of storage, with one of them off the premises and not plugged in. That last part is the bit that has aged into mattering, and the reason is ransomware. It doesn’t politely encrypt the folder marked Important. It takes everything it can see, which includes the external drive hanging off the back of the computer and very often the cloud folder that syncs automatically. The copy that survives is the one that happened to be in a drawer.
Sync is not a backup
Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive and iCloud are not backups. They are sync, and sync keeps every copy identical to every other copy as fast as it possibly can. Wonderful, right up until it is the worst thing in the world.
Your client spreadsheet lives in a Dropbox folder. On Tuesday you delete two hundred rows by accident and hit save out of habit. Dropbox does exactly what you pay it to do and pushes the ruined file up to the cloud and back down onto the laptop, the desktop out the back and your phone, inside a few seconds. Every copy is now the broken one. Same story when someone tidies up a shared folder on their last day.
Three words worth holding apart. Sync keeps copies identical and current. Backup keeps point-in-time copies you can go back to, so a bad Tuesday doesn’t poison last Friday. Archive is the long-term box for things you never touch but are obliged to keep: the ATO expects most business records to be held five years from the transaction, and company and employee records run to seven. The mistake is assuming the first one covers the other two.
The sync services do keep a version history, and it is worth finding that button before the day you need it. But the window is finite, it is nowhere near five years, and a service you can be locked out of by a forgotten password is not a copy you control.
What you’re actually protecting
Be honest first about what the business could not reopen without, because the surprising part is how scattered it is. The accounting sits in Xero or MYOB on somebody else’s servers, or in a desktop file one dead laptop away from gone. The customer list is inside Square, or a booking system nobody has ever exported. The photos are on SD cards that get reformatted. The roster is in Deputy and the rest of the staff paperwork is in a drawer. The supplier agreements and the certificate of currency are buried in an inbox, and an inbox is not a filing system.
So the real job isn’t buying a bigger drive. It’s dragging the scattered things into one folder on one machine, so a single backup can catch all of it. I keep a folder called Business: the monthly Xero and Square exports, the customer spreadsheet, the signed supplier agreements, the current certificate of currency, the staff details. Ten minutes on the first of the month keeps it current. That folder, plus wherever your working files live, is the thing you are protecting.
The setup you can build this afternoon
Boring is the goal. Clever backup systems fail in clever ways that nobody notices for eighteen months.
- Copy one, the working copy. Your files on your computer, where you use them. It already exists, it is not a backup, and it still counts as one of the three.
- Copy two, a continuous cloud backup. Backblaze on the main machine, US$99 a year per computer. It bills in American dollars, so what lands on the card moves with the exchange rate. It runs constantly and keeps earlier versions of files after they change, with a paid add-on that keeps those versions forever. The version history is what saves you from the accidental save-over and from the ransomware, because you can ask for the file as it was before the bad day.
- Copy three, a drive you unplug. A 1TB portable SSD from Officeworks or JB, the cheapest thing on this list by a distance. Once a week, plug it in, drag the Business folder and your photos across, then unplug it and take it home. The unplugging is the entire point. A drive in a drawer at home cannot be encrypted by something running on the shop network.
The first cloud upload will grind away in the background for a day or two on a normal NBN connection, but your hands-on time is under an hour.
The fifteen minutes everyone skips
Now the step that would have saved me that morning in Laverton. A backup is only proven at the moment you restore from it. Every day before that, you are trusting a green tick, which is precisely what I did for eighteen months.
Once a month, pick one real file you would be upset to lose — last month’s accounts export, a client’s gallery. Get it back from the backup rather than from the original: log in to the Backblaze website, find that one file and download it, or plug in the SSD and copy that folder off it. Then open it. Not the filename, the file. Check the rows are there, check the photograph renders. If it doesn’t open, you have found out on a quiet Tuesday of your own choosing instead of on the worst day of your year.
I do mine on the first, while the coffee machine comes up to temperature. It has never once failed. I check anyway, because the eighteen months I didn’t are the eighteen months that taught me the tick was never the point.