A friend of mine based in South Africa, Mavis, recently underwent an ordeal that has made me revise my content plan for this topic to an earlier date than planned. Mavis had a laptop stolen from her car and along with the laptop and her memory sticks. Funny enough, she had multiple memory sticks for backups, but alas, all of them were stored in the laptop bag with the laptop. This happens a lot, funny as it sounds. Thieves stole her laptop from the car, but because all her memory sticks were in the laptop bag, her backups were also taken, leaving her with no way to recover her data. As an academic, this was a big blow. Academics are always authoring some papers, new studies, always analysing data, always reviewing other papers and so on and all this in her case, was all on her now affirmatively repossessed laptop.

This is one form of complete data loss. There are other ways in which one can lose data. I will give another example of Marshall. Marshall was an avid coffee drinker who always owned the latest MacBook’s and purchased one every time a new one came out. He was also a graphics designer and part-time photographer. Safe to say, he had a lot of files on his machine either for himself or his clients. He always told me he had backups, but his backup was an old external hard drive, those ones that have an external power source of their own and would make noises every time you switched them on.

You don’t have to be a clairvoyant to see where this story is headed. One day he comes rushing into my office with a MacBook dripping with coffee. And was begging me to do something to his laptop. But it was too late, the amount of coffee that had been spilled onto the laptop were too much and had short circuited something of importance inside the motherboard of the laptop. He lost everything on that machine. But fear not, he had his trusted hard drive with his backups. He got a new machine from his insurance and then proceeded to start copying his files to the new laptop. And it was at this point that the external hard drive suffered a major hardware catastrophe. During the copy process, the noises inside the drive increased and the copying stopped halfway through. As bad luck would have it, his drive crashed as he was restoring his files. This crash was a head crash of the drive as the drive was a spinning drive.

A hard drive head crash occurs when the read-write head of a hard drive touches the spinning platter, causing physical damage to the platter’s magnetic surface and resulting in catastrophic data loss. Normally, the head floats on a cushion of air, but a shock, debris, or a mechanical defect can cause it to make contact. This contact slashes the surface, destroys data, and is often accompanied by grinding or clicking noises, indicating the drive needs to be replaced. That catastrophic head crash meant a large portion of his data was now unrecoverable and gone forever. I gave these two examples just to show how one can lose data. Data loss in the tech world is a guaranteed certainty. It is just a matter of time of before it happens to you. The question is would you be prepared?

How one can lose data

There are so many ways in which one can lose data. The two anecdotes I gave above are two detailed everyday life examples of how one can easily lose their data.

Human Error
Human beings are always he weakest link in technology. Just like Marshall, some data loss is caused directly by human errors. For example, spilling coffee on your laptop. Or dropping a laptop from the kitchen counter or kicking or tripping on the laptop power cable and throwing the laptop halfway across the dining room. Or one can mistakenly delete files that they did not mean to delete. Or introducing computer viruses on the computer system via social engineering hacks. The end result is usually the same, tears.

Hardware Failure
One fact of life is that hardware fails. And the failure might lead to data loss. This can be a hard drive crash for example, or a mother board just short circuiting for inexplicable reasons. Somes times, hardware can overheat either due to some other hardware or software failures. Some hardware fail

Malicious software
In my last articles, I described what viruses and malicious software is including viruses, worms, ransomware. All these when they affect a computer system can directly lead to data loss. This can be either by making the data itself in accessible or by deleting the data or corrupt the data in such a way that it cannot be recoverable. Ransomware actively encrypts all the files and removes the decryption key which you can then “purchase” from the hackers. If not paid, this can also lead to data loss.

Physical theft
If you data lives on a device that another person can pick up and take away with them, then it means you are vulnerable to data loss by theft. As per my example above of Mavis, the data was physically stolen as it was on the laptop that was stolen. Unless you recover the stolen laptop, chances of getting that data back is slim to none.

Natural disasters
This does happen from time to time, and people lose data this way. Imagine big floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, fires etc, all are natural disasters which will separate you from your data.

How to survive data loss
As a consumer, you can survive data loss and prevent catastrophic effects by being proactive and following a solid backup strategy. The key is to have multiple copies of your important data stored in different ways. The point of having the multiple backups is so that you do not lose all your data in a single event. For example, although Mavis had made backups of her data, there was no separation between the source and the backup, and they were all compromised in the same event.

Use the 3-2-1 Backup Rule

This is a well-known, simple, and highly effective backup strategy for individuals. It’s actually straight forward and can be easily adopted for your use. It goes like this:

3 copies of your data

This includes the original data on your device and two separate backup copies.

2 different storage types
Don’t store all your backups on the same type of media. For example, use an external hard drive (one media type) and a cloud service (a different media type). This protects you from a single point of failure, such as a hardware malfunction that could affect all drives from the same manufacturer.

1 copy off-site
Keep at least one copy of your data in a different physical location. This protects your data from local disasters like fire, flood, or theft. For instance, you could store an external drive at a friend’s house or use a cloud backup service as long as the data is not stored in the same place you store the device that has the data.

Practical tips you can immediately start right.

External Hard drives
External Hard drives are still a great way to had a backup of your data. External drives are now cheap now and one can have multiple drives storing the same data. Large capacity drives are normal and pretty much the norm with one external drive enough to backup data from multiple laptops or desktops. The newer ones are the faster SSD types, the ones that do not have any spinning components, this means they are smaller more portable and have faster read and write access speeds. Links below are more suited for Perth residents. You can find equivalent drives in your area.

https://www.officeworks.com.au/shop/officeworks/p/wd-2tb-elements-se-portable-hard-drive-wdel2000se?scrollTop=false

https://www.thegoodguys.com.au/western-digital-2tb-elements-se-portable-hdd-black-wdbepk0020bbk-wesn

https://www.jbhifi.com.au/products/seagate-one-touch-portable-2tb-hard-drive-black

https://www.officeworks.com.au/shop/officeworks/p/seagate-2tb-one-touch-portable-hard-drive-space-grey-sgstky2tbg?scrollTop=false

With an external hard drive, you can either manually copy data from your machine to the drive, or you can automate the backing up with utilities for backup, some which might be available for the brand of drive you buy.

Cloud Storage Services

There are a number of cloud storage services available for free or for a fee for larger storage packages. Someone once described the cloud as someone’s computer sitting in a data centre somewhere. And as a user you can take advantage of these services and automatically synchronise your files with the service. Common well known cloud storage services include Microsoft’s One Drive, Google Drive, Apple’s iCloud, and Drop Box. They have all one thing in common, simplicity and automation in their usage. You get the storage, you install a utility app on your device and that’s it. The app will then make sure that anything you change on your computer is automatically backed up into the cloud without you having to do anything else. This means that if anything happens to your laptop, e.g. coffee spill, or you drop the laptop, you will have the latest files all backed onto the cloud service. It also removes the onus from the user of having to remember to make occasional backups, they are all done automatically.

Google Drive is tied to a Google Account. Its free to open a Google Account, and every account automatically gets 15GB of storage for your use. Apple iCloud is also tied to your iCloud account and gets you 5GB free storage. Microsoft’s One drive also offers the same free storage as iCloud. Personally, I use two cloud services, Google Drive and One Drive all as paid services. Take note, one can equally backup all their files without having to pay, don’t think you need to pay when you don’t need the larger capacity storage.

Sign up for these services and start taking advantage of free backup storage. If you already have a Google Account, Microsoft Account, or iCloud account, it means you already have the storage already. All you will need to do is install the software for your platform on your device so that the backup can be done automatically.

You can get Google drive here – https://drive.google.com/drive/my-drive

One Drive here – https://onedrive.live.com/login

iCloud here – https://www.apple.com/au/icloud/

With any two of these, you will be good to go. Download and install the software for the chosen services and you will start getting your backups done automatically. The obvious assumption with cloud storage services which I haven’t mentioned is that you will need internet for the synchronisation between your laptop and the cloud to happen. This is not necessarily a problem for many, but thought I’d mention it.

USB Flash Drives/CDs/DVDs

While not ideal for a full system backup due to limited capacity, these are perfect for backing up smaller, critical files like family photos, important documents, or financial records. They are easy to store off-site and can be kept in a safe place. In addition, they are also quite cheap.

Remember: 3-2-1 Backup Rule

I hope you have learnt something that will help you one day in the event of data loss.

Disclaimer: The product and service recommendations in this article are based on personal experience and are provided for informational purposes only. I am not affiliated with or sponsored by any of the companies mentioned, and I do not receive any compensation for recommending them. It is essential to conduct your own research and choose the solutions that best fit your individual needs and circumstances before making a purchase.