|
–Geoff-Hart.com: Editing, Writing, and Translation —Home —Services —Books —Articles —Resources —Fiction —Contact me —Français |
You are here: Articles --> 2021 --> Backing up your data
Vous êtes ici : Essais --> 2021 --> Backing up your data
By Geoffrey Hart
Previously published as: Hart, G. 2021. Backing up your data... and other important things. https://www.worldts.com/english-writing/398/index.html
As a researcher, you spend large amounts of time and money acquiring and analyzing data. If anything happens to that data, you’ve wasted all that time and money. In some cases, it may be impossible to replace the data because it’s impossible to repeat the research. Apart from the impact on your reputation and your ability to do more research in the future, you may have lost information crucial to human health and well-being or to the survival of rare and endangered species. For this reason, it’s essential to have a strong backup strategy for your data.
Most researchers work for large organizations, such as universities and research institutes, and these organizations generally do an adequate job of safeguarding employee data. Unfortunately, it’s no longer safe to rely solely on these people for your data protection. The staff who are responsible for this work are usually overworked, and represent a single point of failure. The data they protect is also a target for criminals, since a university or research institute’s data represents a concentration of valuable information. As a result, the news media have reported increasing numbers of security breaches that involved the theft of valuable data. Ransomware is a growing problem and a particular concern. Whereas traditional computer hackers are most interested in stealing a copy of your data, a growing number of modern hackers may be more interested in preventing you from accessing your own data.
Note: Ransomware is software that encrypts data and other computer files so that you cannot access them without paying the hacker a large amount of money (the ransom) to provide you with the encryption key.
It’s also necessary to preserve more than just your data; there are many tangible and intangible things you should protect, and these are rarely included in your employer’s data backup and protection strategies. In part II of this article, I’ll describe things you should be doing by yourself, independent of what your employer is doing, to safeguard the results of your hard work. I’ll try to encourage you to develop backup strategies for these other things too.
A successful backup strategy should include the following elements:
Ongoing backups are copies of your work that you create as you work, often using automatic tools. These tools include specialized software such as the Time Machine software installed on Apple computers or Acronis True Image for Windows computers. You can also create these backups manually. This approach sometimes stores backups on the same computer you’re using to create information, but a better solution is to store the data elsewhere, such as on a shared disk drive on your employer’s network or on a “cloud” storage site. (I’ll discuss cloud backups later in this section.)
In addition, most modern software lets you automatically save copies of the files that you’re working on. For example, Microsoft Word offers both automatic backups (in which it creates a copy each time you open a file) and automatic (autosave) backups at scheduled intervals (in which it saves changes in the file you’re currently working on).
Although these features protect you if your program crashes and loses the data in memory, they won’t work if your hard disk fails or your entire computer is stolen or destroyed. Near-line backups store copies of your information on something close (“near”) to your computer, such as a USB flash drive plugged into your computer or an external hard drive. They protect you against failures of your computer, but if your lab burns down or is destroyed by a hurricane, you’re going to lose those backups too. If the near-line storage is portable, so that you can bring it home with you at the end of the day, this provides some insurance against such problems. (Moving your backups to a different location is called “off-site backup”.) A laboratory fire won’t cause the loss of your data, but a hurricane that destroys your lab may also destroy your home. This is an important justification for cloud-based backups.
Offline backups are not available simply by connecting to your employer’s computer network. Typically, you must retrieve them from a storage site and specifically attach them to your computer. Examples include magnetic-tape drives for large backups and CD-ROM or DVD-R disks for backups less than about 5 gigabytes. The tapes are best for large volumes of data, but may be more fragile than other methods and less suitable for truly long-term storage. The disks are potentially more durable (though they too will eventually degrade), but have the additional advantage that they cannot be overwritten by ransomware.
Note: “Write protection” means that a file cannot be overwritten. This may be permanent, as in the case of a write-once DVD disk; temporary as a result of the hardware, as in the case of a flash drive with a hardware toggle that lets you switch between allowing and disallowing changes; or temporary as a result of the software, as in the case of changing the properties of a file to “read only”. The latter is similar to a hardware toggle, but is set through software and can be disabled by software or by a hacker.
Cloud (Internet) backups offer the advantage of off-site storage, so that if anything happens to your research facility, and the same catastrophe is sufficiently widespread to affect your home, your data will still be safe somewhere else in the world. In most cases, the data will be stored on multiple servers in different countries. These backups offer the protection of a full-time staff who are responsible for security, and the distribution of your data to multiple cities or countries means that the loss of any one copy is not serious; you can retrieve a copy from backups at other sites. The primary disadvantage of cloud backups is that such networks are not always available, and Murphy’s law suggests that they will become unavailable the one time you need them. Their security also isn’t foolproof; any network can be hacked by a sufficiently determined hacker.
Note: Smaller vendors of cloud storage services may not store your data at multiple, widely separated locations. When you choose a cloud storage vendor, check the details of their storage locations carefully to ensure that they meet your needs.
Given this description of methods, how do I protect my data? I use the following strategies:
I also create a clone (identical copy) of my computer’s hard drive every few months using an older computer so that if my computer is damaged or stolen, I can continue working from the old computer.
One way to create a protected version of your data is to compress it as a .zip or .tar archive before you begin working on a file. That way, if you accidentally damage the original file or if it’s damaged by malware, you can easily return to the original data.
Automate as much of the backup process as possible, since human nature tends to make us forget to do backups, particular when we’re tired or working late. Many backup services such as Acronis True Image and Backblaze let you install software that creates ongoing backups of your data in your office or on their Internet storage network. Verify your backups immediately after they’re complete to ensure that you can actually reopen them. For example, open a few important files in the backup to ensure that the copy was created successfully and no files were missed.
In the second part of this article, I’ll describe things other than data that you should safeguard using backups.Note: If you work on confidential information (e.g., human medical data) or proprietary information (e.g., research related to patented information), don’t store that information outside your employer’s computer network without their explicit permission. Even if you do have their permission, encrypt the data (encode it) so that if a stranger gains access to the location where your files are stored, they cannot read the files. Store the encryption password somewhere safe; if you lose it, the encrypted data will generally be unrecoverable.
©2004–2024 Geoffrey Hart. All rights reserved.