Today, so much of our lives are lived in the ever-flowing river of data that we produce, consume and discard. But, what if you lose that data? What if your data gets compromised by some bad actor on the Internet? Do you have a plan in place to backup that data? That’s the topic of today’s cast -- creating a data backup storage system.
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In this Cast
Ray Sidney-Smith
Augusto Pinaud
Francis Wade
Art Gelwicks
Show Notes | Creating a Backup Storage System
Resources we mention, including links to them will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context.
Google Drive
iCloud
OneDrive
Evernote
OneNote
Dropbox
pCloud
iDrive
Google Docs
Google Backup and Sync
Time Machine
Duplicati
Phones and tablets (Android and iOS) - backed up using https://www.sync-droid.com.
Google Drive gets downloaded and converted to native MSFT files (using https://www.driveexport.com/) and then saved to an external HDD which is then backed up using Duplicati to the cloud; and for G Suite users, enable Google Vault and also see:
https://spinbackup.com/
https://spanning.com/products/google-apps-backup/
Raw Text Transcript | Creating a Backup Storage System
Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be substantial errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. The time coding is mm:ss (e.g., 0:04 starts at 4 seconds into the cast’s audio).
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Voiceover Artist 0:00
Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling productive life? Then you've come to the right place productivity cast, the weekly show about all things productivity. Here are your hosts, Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17
Welcome back everybody to productivity cast, the weekly show about all things productivity.
I'm Ray Sidney-Smith and I'm joined here with
Unknown 0:28
Augusto Pinaud
Francis Wade
Art Gelwicks
Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:29
So much of our lives are lived in the ever flowing river of data that we produce, consume and discard. But what if you lose that data? What if your data gets compromised by some bad actor on the internet? It happens? Do you have a plan in place to backup that data. And that's the topic of today's cast. Francis originally generated this topic idea. So I'm going to turn it over to you, Francis to talk a little bit about the background that led you to come up with this topic in the first place.
Francis Wade 0:55
Let me let me go back in time a little bit when I started leading time management programs about 10 years ago, one of the skills that defined was something called storing. And it was really all about people. And what's happened over time is that it's of course changed. Because who uses paper anymore? Right? Most of us are using digital information. And the challenge is that many people have not made that transition from storing stuff on paper to storing stuff digitally. So they don't have the skills of having great backups. So what me battery backup is when a disaster occurs, you are completely protected. So tsunami or a hurricane hits, and there goes your laptop, and your phone and and all of your this gets and hard drive external hard drives? And what do you have to store your contacts, your appointments, all the critical information that you needed all your passwords? Where is all that information? And how can you keep it stored on over regular basis so that you're completely protected no matter what happens? And recently, I had a of course, a catastrophe. Yeah, I learned the hard way that my
my system that I thought was perfect had a flaw because it was not backing up a particular kind of file, which was that you know, the provided and tell me this information. I found that out after the fact, last a couple days work complained. But I realized that I didn't have a great system in place. Not as good as I thought I did. In particular, what bothered me was at things like pictures of my great great, great grandparents. So I have some pictures like that. I have the paper picture. And I have the digital picture. But I still haven't solved the problem of where you store either kind of picture, where do I store a long term legacy file, so that I can win one day? So it till I don't have great grandkids? But if I had great grandkids, if I think we're going to have them? Well, how would I show it hold? I keep it for them? How do I keep legacy files so that they last forever? What's the safe place is obviously not my hard drive or my smartphone. But where is it? So that's what sort of got the thought going.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 3:14
Thanks for the background. That's great. So I wanted to start us off with discussing perhaps the importance of having backups, Francis, you point out several of them, primarily the the idea of catastrophe that destroys a computer or all of your computers. I heard a couple of weeks ago, house exploded, probably from propane, or whatever the gas was that was being used in the house filled up, and the house literally exploded and killed the two the two residents. And that's just insane to think that that can happen in today's day and age. But it does hurricanes happen. A colleague of mine had all of his businesses, computer servers swallowed up by an earthquake. And so we all experience catastrophe on on occasion, my office had a building fire, actually, quite recently, to name a few, you know, catastrophes that that have happened to, you know, in my own world, and without those backups, really, that would have been potentially the end of the business, because so much of what a businesses is its data. And so do you do any of you have any thoughts in terms of the any thoughts that you wanted to share with listeners about the importance of of backup data, and then we can kind of go into how we each set up our systems or would would ideally set up a system,
Augusto Pinaud 4:41
I have one word for oldest, and the word is redundant. I mean, it doesn't matter where they are, but you cannot trust on a one place. So you need to have redundancy of those backups, especially the more important content is the most more redundancy you need. In my particular case, I have a service call code 42. It's a company who make it on the software is called crush plan, and that goes to their server and eat aside of that, I also have Dropbox for all the other files. And I also have Evernote so and they tend to be replicated. So if one of the three servers fail, or two of the three servers fail, I will still be okay. I also have a local hard drive at home that do backup. So I'm not going to say is completely fail proof. I'm sure there's ways that hold that can be containing a massive catastrophe that will make that I lose all of that. But in general, I think there is a I have a list chance of this happening to me,
Art Gelwicks 5:56
I run a similar process of one note, one drive Google Drive
Unknown 6:04
local hard drive,
Art Gelwicks 6:05
let's drives
the redundancy that
a goose oh just mentioned is critical to us. If you don't have a way to have things in multiple places, because we all know bad things happen. even beyond just bad things though data corruptions, synchronization, there's, there's a lot of reason why your information can get out of sync.
I count on those multiple systems. But if it's something's really critical, I'll put it on to a flash drive, and throw that flash drive into firebox. Things like tax return information, scans of critical documents, all of those are on a flash drive, that's in a firebox right now. So I've got stuff every place, which creates its own issues. But I should be able to recover whatever I need.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 7:04
Yeah, there certainly is something to say for understanding the various types of ways data can be destroyed. For example, art is talking about fire damage, obviously, there's an opportunity for water damage, if there's flooding, there's opportunity for if you are using digital data, most data is written through magnetic means meaning that it's imprinted through putting ones and zeros and magnetic code on on these on these, you know drive sometimes. And so the goal for you is to figure out and make sure that the data is stored in a place that is is not going to be magnetized, or have a strong magnetic magnetic field that's going to destroy the data. So you have to really think about these things, high pressure environments, right? You can't put, you know, if you if you decide to to backup to say DVDs, and you you write your data to DVD, and stick that in an environment that has high pressure, and a little bit of heat. And guess what that DVD is going to warp. And that will be the end of that. So long term storage needs to be thought about it needs to be in a climate controlled environment, you know, preferably off the floor, and, and fireproof. So. So yeah, if you're going to do physical data storage, that's, that's important. I personally believe in thorough backups of all of your data. But you have to start defining what you know, quote, unquote, all your data means. And whether you're keeping the data you need, or are in control of it all. Many times, you don't actually hold your data, like your your Gmail, email, if you use that, as a repository for information. Do you really have control over that. And so that means maybe you need to use Google Checkout,
