PSA thread: your backup is not a backup until you have tested a restore

[QuantumFoam]

Prompted by a friend losing ten years of photos this week, consider this the board's semi regular backup sermon and an open thread for questions. The rule that matters is 3-2-1, three copies of anything important, on two different types of storage, with one copy off site or in the cloud

The part everyone skips is the last step, actually testing a restore. A backup you have never restored from is a hope, not a backup. Pick one random file from your backup today and get it back onto your machine, if that little exercise fails you want to find out now and not during a house fire

Common traps worth naming, an external drive permanently plugged into the same machine dies with it in a power surge and gets encrypted with it in a ransomware event, cloud sync is not backup because it faithfully syncs your deletions and corruption, and RAID protects against a dead drive, not against you deleting the wrong folder

Post your current setup below and the board will kindly point out its weak spot, or ask for a recommendation for your situation and budget. No setup is too embarrassing, the embarrassing thing is having nothing

[AustinTheory18]

Setup: everything on one external drive in the same bag as the laptop. I know. I KNOW. Telling on myself so someone makes me fix it

[MondayMoan]

That is not a backup, that is a matched set for a thief. Cloud copy tonight, drive stays at your mums by Friday

[HeartbreakKid_Fan]

The sync is not backup point needs shouting. Watched someone lose a thesis because a cloud drive dutifully synced the corrupted file across every device

[Cass81]

Versioning solves that though, most decent cloud services keep 30 days of file history. Check yours before paying for anything new

[Mick79]

NAS owner checking in with the smug face, until last month when I realised my NAS was my only copy and it lives under the same roof as everything else

[Ben]

The off site copy is the one everyone skips because it is the only one requiring an actual habit. Automate it or it will not happen

[ParallelSelf90]

For photos specifically, do people trust the big photo clouds as one of the three copies or do they count as zero?

[Highland Dylan]

Count them as one copy, never as the only one. Accounts get locked for daft reasons and support is a lottery

[Shane96]

Test restore report, tried recovering one file as instructed and discovered my backup software had been silently failing since March. This thread has already paid for itself

[Sam92]

March! And the only reason you know is a forum post. Everyone reading this, go check yours right now, we will wait