Permit me to introduce Alice and Bob. Alice is smart, sophisticated, balanced and reasonable. Bob is, uh, less so. They each have backup and recovery strategies that meet their needs and risk tolerance. Let’s start with Alice.
Alice has a Windows 11 PC she uses for her personal IT consulting business. An avid amateur photographer, she prefers a MacBook Pro for photo-editing. She carries an iPhone for both personal and business calls.
Immediately after purchasing her PC, Alice generated a USB recovery drive using the Windows backup utility. The recovery drive contained no sensitive information, so she left it unencrypted. She stored it in a desk drawer in her home office.
While she was creating a recovery drive, she created a disk image backup. She stored the image backup on an encrypted external drive. The drive had a keypad to unlock it: an Apricorn Aegis Padlock. It was a little pricey, but worth it to protect her business data. She added the Padlock PIN to her password manager, stored the drive in her desk drawer with the recovery drive, and added a recurring schedule notice to Microsoft Outlook, reminding her to update the image backup every six months.
To protect her Windows files against catastrophic loss, and following the 3-2-1 rule, she backed up her files in two ways. First, she signed up for a cloud backup service with iDrive. She installed the backup agent on her PC and configured it to back up continuously. She kept her sensitive business data in several virtual encrypted disks on her PC using VeraCrypt, and used the default iDrive managed encryption key to protect her data at rest in the cloud.
She had confidence that iDrive was protecting her files, but to honor the 3-2-1 rule, she also kept a local file backup. She found the Windows File History utility to be clunky and did not view her files as being at risk, so once a month she copied and pasted the Desktop, Documents, Music, Pictures and Video directories to an external drive. Three versions of these backups were rotated on the same drive. She used the same Apricorn Aegis Padlock she used to store her disk images, and added a monthly schedule notice to Microsoft Outlook to remind her to perform the backup.
Confident that she had strong and reliable protection for her business data, she considered the best strategy to back up her photographs. Following the rule of three, she setup both local and cloud backup. Since she already had a iDrive account for her business data, she used iDrive for MacBook Pro for cloud backup. She opted to use the default encryption key since she did not keep data she regarded as particularly sensitive on the Mac. She configured iDrive for continuous backup. For local backup, she attached a USB stick and configured Time Machine to create and manage an encrypted backup every time she edited photos. She stored the Time Machine backup password in her password manager. When not in use, she kept the USB stick in her desk drawer with her other backups drives.
To create and manage a clone for the internal drive on her MacBook, she purchased a copy of Carbon Copy Cloner and stored the clone on her Apricorn Aegis Padlock drive. She set a schedule notice in Microsoft Outlook to update the clone semi-annually.
Alice configured iCloud to back up her phone automatically and enabled Advanced Data Protection to secure her data from prying eyes. She stored less than 5 GBs of data, so there was no additional cost for the service. Her iPhone data was not particularly important to her, so she chose not to make a separate local backup to her Mac,
Alice reviewed her backup and recovery strategy. She had solid protection for her business data files, and the Windows recovery drive and image backup would ease restoration of her PC in the event of disk or device failure. Strong encryption protected her sensitive data. Both local and remote file backup ensured the protection of her PC and Mac files following the 3-2-1 rule. She had a remote backup of her iPhone.
The costs were modest. There was a one-time cost for some external drives and Carbon Copy Cloner. VeraCrypt was open source and the Windows and macOS utilities came with the operating systems. There was an annual subscription for iDrive, but she felt that the convenience and reliability of the service more than justified the cost. And after the initial setup, she only had to refresh the image backup and MacBook clone semi-annually and the PC file backups monthly. She was satisfied. It was a job well done.
We’ll see how Bob managed his backups in the next post.
Information provided in this post is subject to the disclaimer in the first post of this series.