Authors: Karen Renaud, Zinaida Benenson, Daniela Oliveira
Imagine you’re sitting at your desk, working on your laptop. Suddenly you knock over your coffee cup and it spills over your keyboard. Your computer shorts out and dies. You lose all your personal images and important work documents. Disaster!
Many disasters can befall your precious devices and stored files. Power packs explode or laptop get stolen. Malware could infect your computer.
We engage in a number of activities to resist disasters. For example, we install anti-virus software, we are wary of suspicious emails, and we keep our laptops secure. However, we cannot achieve total immunity.
We need also to ensure that we are resilient so that when resistance fails, we know we can recover from disasters.
One of the best ways to achieve resilience in the face of data loss is to make regular backups. Backing up seems like a no-brainer, but backups, on their own, only go part of the way towards recovering from a disastrous event. It is actually complicated. You can pay for a cloud-based service to keep copies of your files. Unfortunately, this does not reduce the amount of time it takes to get back to where you were before the disaster. It takes days to re-install all the applications, to get all the browser bookmarks back, to be as productive as you were in the moments before the disaster occurred.
Yes, Apple’s Time Machine can make full backups of everything: files, apps, music, photos, email, documents, and system files. But not everyone can afford this.
Making manual backups tends to be time consuming and effortful. And … you should keep backups in a different location so that if you were to experience a physical disaster like water or fire damage, you still have your backups. You should also encrypt your backups but not everyone knows how to do this.
Most of us make use of Cloud services to back up our files, but free services offer limited storage space, and there is always the risk that our personal information could be leaked.
There’s no easy solution to this problem, but what we cannot do is to put our heads in the sand and hope that disaster will never strike.
We are planning to carry out research to come up with more usable resilience solutions – for now we can only advise people to make backups in whatever way they can. The first author is certainly glad that she remembered to do this, two days before her disaster occurred!