How to Backup your Data – Cloud / NAS / PC / Phone

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I cannot stress just how important it is to back up your data, whether it’s your photos from your phone, or your PC important documents, it’s something I highly, highly recommend. Drives fail, you can lose or damage your phone, and sometimes you just delete things by accident, so having a backup is well worth it. But, it’s not always simple, so in this video I want to lay out your options and talk you through getting them set up.

Let’s start with where the data goes, then we can figure out how to get it there. The one you are probably most familiar with is “Cloud Storage”, whether that’s iCloud, Google Drive, Microsoft Onedrive, or third party options like Dropbox, you’ve likely heard of at least one of them. In general, they offer file storage that you don’t control, but is generally secure and both reliable and redundant (as in your files won’t go missing because a single drive in their datacenter failed).

The pros to cloud storage are general ease of use, low upfront costs, some offer bonus features like easily sharing and collaborating on files and security in knowing your files aren’t going anywhere any time soon. The cons are a lack of security and privacy, since you are storing your data on someone else’s server, and the fact the costs are ongoing for as long as you are storing files with them. Sure, many offer a small amount of storage for free, but you’d be surprised how quickly even the photos on your phone would fill up the 15GB Google gives you for free.

To give you an idea on pricing, Apple’s iCloud service costs 70p per month for 50GB of space, £2.49 for 200GB, or £6.99 for 2TB. Google Drive costs £15.99 per year for 100GB, £24.99 per year for 200GB, or £79.99 per year for 2TB, and Dropbox wants £7.99 per month (billed yearly) for 2TB of space. Interestingly, there is another option if you only want to back up a computer, it’s called Backblaze, they are a cloud storage provider who offer a personal backup plan that costs $60 per year, and comes with unlimited storage. Seriously. What’s even more cool is that if your PC’s drive fails and you need to recover your data, you can either download it all over the internet, or pay them $189 and they will ship you an 8TB HDD loaded with your data, and if you return the drive after you’ve got your data they’ll even refund that cost too.

Most of these cloud providers automatically sync and backup files as you create them, meaning once it’s set up you don’t have to think about it again, plus you are normally able to access and share those files pretty easily. In the case of Google Drive, they even let you create documents, spreadsheets and presentations and people you share those files with can work on that at the same time as you.

But what if you don’t want to give your data to Google or Apple? Or what if you want to work with those files, but still have them protected, say if you wanted to edit videos but be able to have your PC die and not lose anything. Well, you can store the files yourself. Doing it DIY can offer a lot more flexibility and especially speed, as you won’t be reliant on your internet connection to upload and download everything. What you’ll need is a NAS, or Network Attached Storage device.

There are a few downsides to storing everything yourself. First is the upfront cost, where the enclosure can cost £200 at a minimum, then the hard drives which can be £100-300 each and you need two at a minimum, or four to be properly safe. That does buy you a lot more storage though, as two 8TB drives would set you back a little over £500, but would give you 8TB of redundant space. The other con for a more DIY solution is the safety of your data. When you store files on Google Drive or iCloud, you can be certain that next to nothing will cause you to lose that data. But with your own NAS, if your house catches on fire, or even if multiple disks happen to fail at the same time, you would be out of luck. The ideal backup solution is to have an ‘off site’ backup, either by using a cloud provider as well, or by having a second NAS physically far away from your primary one, like on the other side of the country, or ideally a different continent, depending on how dedicated you are.

There are two ways of building a NAS, you can buy an ‘over-the-counter’ product like the QNAP or Synology units I’ve reviewed in the past, or build one yourself, which I’ve also shown. The prebuilt units do make things pretty easy, you buy the enclosure, a few of the same model and capacity drive, plug them in and that’s pretty much it up and running. Just a couple of clicks in a web browser and you are set. They do have their downsides, as they are often rather underpowered and occasionally can be vulnerable to malware, but on the whole they are pretty easy and a great shout.

Building a NAS can be a bit more tricky. You’ll need to be familiar with building computers already, and know what operating system you’d want to use. I have both FreeNAS (which is now called TrueNAS) and UNRAID systems, both have their quirks. For me, my UNRAID NAS is comprised of 6 10TB WD Gold enterprise hard drives, a 1TB M.2 NVMe SSD as a cache, and a 24 core Threadripper for virtual machines, plus a 10Gb ethernet card so I can edit straight from the NAS rather than store any of the files on my PC directly. I’ve made videos on building both my NASes already, so if you are interested feel free to check them out in the cards above.

I’ve specifically not mentioned external USB hard drives here, and for good reason. While these are fine for temporarily holding or transporting otherwise secure data, they aren’t a good option for actually backing up. The drives that get put into those products are often the lowest tier, slowest drives, and are heinously unreliable. Having a single drive hold all your data is a really bad idea, at a minimum I’d want two so if one of them fails I haven’t lost anything.

So, that’s where to store the data, now how do you get it there? Well, like I said for cloud providers, most have apps for your phone and computer that will automatically sync your files and let you access them anywhere. Some, like Google Drive create a folder on your PC you have to store files in, which stores a local copy on your machine and uploads a copy in the background. Others, like Backblaze, are more of a true “backup” which means it runs in the background uploading your files as they change without getting in your way.

On mobile devices, you can have them automatically backup and sync your photos and videos, like on Google Drive through the Google Photos app, or even backup your phone’s app data, text messages and device settings like WiFi passwords through the Google Drive app. On iOS devices, you can use iCloud Photos to do the same automatic backups and syncing, or backup your whole device with their automatic backups.

What if you are using your own NAS? Well, the freedom you get from building it yourself also means you can choose how you want to store your data. You can work from the NAS like I do meaning your files are always in the array being kept safe. Or go the manual route, copying your files over periodically. That’s not great though, so how about some tools to automate that?

The first one that comes to mind is Owncloud, which is a mostly open source tool that you can run as a server on your NAS, for example it’s an app you can install from the QNAP App Center, then using the desktop and mobile apps have it sync and backup your files automatically to your NAS. It’s not perfect, but means you are in control of your files and data.

You can also use nextcloud, which is similar to owncloud but also offers features like Zoom style video calls, all run and routed through your NAS. It’s meant to be more feature rich, but it’s not as widely available so to install it on a QNAP NAS you’ll need to run it in a virtual machine or docker container, something that while perfectly doable isn’t quite as beginner friendly as a couple of clicks for owncloud.

If you just want to backup a PC, I can highly recommend the EaseUS Todo Backup program. It supports backing up multiple drives and folders, and most importantly for me incremental backups meaning it doesn’t just save every file every time it backs up, it only saves the files that have changed. It’s also free to do all that, I’ve got it setup to run weekly and it’s saved my bacon a number of times now.

So, that’s a look at just some of your options for backing up your data. I know it may seem like a lot, but trust me when I say it’s worth doing.