Bob’s backup and recovery strategy was a little more eccentric. In part because he was more paranoid than Alice (think tinfoil hats), and in part because he was cheap.
Bob had a hopped-up desktop PC running Windows 11 and an Android phone. He’d built the PC from parts he’d scavenged from a recycling business. The Android phone was a hand-me-down from his older sister. He used the PC for gaming. The phone was strictly for phone calls—he disabled Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity on the phone. Given his approach to telephony, he thought backing up his Android phone was pointless, so he didn’t bother.
Bob loathed Microsoft, in his view the biggest of the big brothers. He much preferred Linux, but his preferred gaming software only ran on Windows, so he was stuck. While he was arguably crazy, he was not crazy enough to do without a backup strategy. This was his plan.
Starting with USB drives he’d collected as giveaways at Comic-Con, he reformatted them and created a virtual encrypted disk on each one using VeraCrypt. He kept the encryption keys in an open-source password manager, Bitwarden, on his PC. He created a recovery drive (unencrypted) and image backup (encrypted) on these USB drives, which he updated monthly and stored them in his sock drawer.
For file backup, given that he had three independent disk drives in his PC, once a week he copied and pasted his data directories to another one of the three disk drive. It struck him as unlikely that more than one disk would fail at the same time. But not entirely trusting Microsoft with his precious data files, he used File History to create a second backup on an encrypted USB drive, updating daily, and keeping saved versions until space was needed. He kept this USB drive in the glove compartment of his car when not in use, which in his mind constituted a disaster recovery site. In any event, he surely would not back up anything to the cloud where “they” could get to it. And cloud backup costs money.
Bob was particularly paranoid about losing his password database (not an unreasonable fear). If he lost a record of his randomly generated 25-character passwords, he was doomed. In an abundance of caution, he backed up his password database to a separate encrypted USB drive which he wrapped in tinfoil, concealed in an old metal Sucrets box, and then shrink-wrapped. In the dark of night, he crept into the woods behind his house and buried the box at the base of a tree into which he’d carved “Bob+Alice,” when he was a lovelorn teenager. He felt sure that the love exuding from the tree would provide an extra level of protection.
When he mentioned this to Alice, she thought that this was sweet—if incredibly dorky.
So much for Bob’s strategy, now you must develop one that works for you.
Keep it simple and take one step at a time. Make sure that as a minimum you backup your files regularly, encrypt sensitive data, and follow the 3-2-1 rule. If you don’t do anything else, and your budget can afford it, purchase a cloud backup service and set it for continuous update to protect your files.
But most of all, just do it. This is a MUST.
Information provided in this post is subject to the disclaimer in the first post of this series.