Why do I need a backup, anyway?

Why do I need a backup, anyway?
Photo by Joshua Hoehne / Unsplash

In the introduction I mentioned that there are a number of ways to lose data - and I want to examine a few of these now. Our goal for this chapter is to better understand the risks, so we can then make sure we’re protected against each and every one of them.

In later chapters we will come up with a nice simple means for ensuring that none of these, or even unforeseen circumstances are able to hurt our precious data.

There must be 50 ways to lose your data

Just pressing delete, Pete

We’ve all done it - hit delete in the wrong folder, or said to ourselves ‘this is the old copy’ and dragged it to the trash. If we’re lucky, we realise immediately and can recover it from the recycle bin, but sometimes it’s days before we realise what we did, and it’s long gone.

On a smaller scale, we can copy and paste something inside a document and overwrite something we didn’t mean to. Or cut something, get distracted and forget to paste it back. Or the cat walks across the keyboard and does who-knows-what to your work in progress. And yes, every one of these has happened to me.

However it happens, you need some way to get back to a version you had before so you can undo whatever it was. If you can go back through the last few revisions, you can go back to before the mistake was made - even if you don’t realise what you did right away.

Our backup needs to have some sort of ability to go back in time and view old versions of our files.

Or watching it break, Jake

Hard disks die. SSDs die. Laptops die. Computers die. If your data is on them when it happens, it can die too, or at least be expensive if not downright impossible to recover. Whether by fire, flood, dropping it down the stairs or just the passage of time, sooner or later the device you’re writing on will be a paperweight. And worse than that, sometimes they fail in subtler ways - corrupting your files and not having the decency to let you know it’s replaced your masterpiece with 750,000 copies of the word ’sausage’.

So we need a way to get our data off the fragile things we entrust it to, so when the inevitable happens we can just shrug and say ‘oh well.’ Or more likely cry, drink, check our insurance cover, cry again and then eventually accept that at least our work is OK while we max out the credit card to buy a new shiny thing to replace the old one.

Our backup needs to be safe from the failure of our main computer.

It’s utterly gone, John

Sadly we don’t live in a world where you can leave something on your table when you go to get a coffee and still expect it to be there when you get back. Bags can be stolen in seconds without you even realising until the thief is long gone. A company I used to work for had to institute fines for people who 'lost' their laptops, it happened so often.

Things go missing, get left on trains, get stolen or just put ‘somewhere safe’ and never seen again. And whatever was on them is gone right along with them. I was inspired to put this book together by someone posting on Facebook that they had left their laptop on the train, and their backup was in the same bag. (Luckily she was reunited with it, but for a while she was beside herself).

And no-one likes to think about it, but houses get burgled too. Or catch fire, or flood, or are otherwise rendered uninhabitable. Since your computer is in there, it might well be gone too. And if the backup is on a disk plugged into that computer, or in the backpack with your laptop, it’ll be gone right along with it.

Our backup needs to be somewhere else - not somewhere it can be wiped out along with the computer.

Watch out for a hack, Jack

This is probably the one that most people worry about, and while it’s actually much rarer than the other scenarios it does happen. You’re checking your email, open a link and the next thing you know someone’s asking you for bitcoin to get your files back. Or you go to check your email and find that your password’s stopped working.

The British Library was hit by a cyber-attack in 2023, and as of writing this in 2025 they are still struggling to get everything back online again. This was a so-called 'ransomware' incident (a type of computer attack that encrypts files and asks for a payment to get them back).

Or did you hear about Maersk, the largest global shipping company? They were hit by ransomware in 2017. It took them six months, and cost them more than $300,000,000 before they got everything back up and running properly. Many other companies were hit by the same attack, and estimates suggest over $10 billion of damage was done worldwide.

How can we protect against something that devastating? Backups. They won’t prevent you getting infected, but if we do it right we can be 100% confident that we can take our files to another computer and keep on working.

Our backup needs to be malware-resistant - it must be impossible for ransomware to wipe it out along with our computer.

One more consideration - how much do we actually need to backup? You might choose only to protect your writing, or you might also want to look after those irreplaceable photos of your kids growing up, or your music collection… I will focus on preserving your writing in the first place, but every piece of advice in this book is just as applicable to any other files you want to keep safe. I absolutely recommend backing up everything you can.