What the heck is data protection you ask? Why do you even need it?
As many say, all IT engineers are split into two groups: those who are not doing backups yet and others who are already doing it.
Data loss is irreversible and painful. You never think about it until it’s too late. And you cannot go back in time to get it back and recovery is a costly process that is not guaranteed at all.
So your data must be protected no matter what. And if you think it’s something that’s important for business, you’re wrong. In fact, everyone needs it. Your family photos, your music experiments, your Minecraft worlds, etc.
Your hardware will fail no matter what. It’s not may, it will. Everything has a lifetime and your precious fancy laptop or ubercool gaming rug is not an exception. HDDs die within months or days (who uses it those days) but SSDs die in hours or sometimes even minutes.
And if you think that storing everything in the cloud is the solution, you might be wrong.
Recent episodes with datacenter attacks demonstrate why storing it all just in a cloud shouldn’t be your only option either. It’s a harsh example but the fires and datacenter AC failures are still real and happening.
So how to do it properly? Well, the general strategy that works for me that is time proven is to sync your data into the cloud WHILE having it locally. Just do it for all your important profile folders, let it sync and forget about it.
But do not clean it from your local system unless it’s something you’re ready to wave goodbye to. If it’s not that important, it may not even be worth wasting your cash on storing in the cloud.
As an extra mile use Windows Backup or Time Machine to backup the same folders to your home network location as well. It’s not ideal for data protection to store it in the same physical location but having a third copy never hurts. I use a home server with a cheap 4TB SAMSUNG EVO SSD and connect it over iSCSI with BitLocker encryption enabled. I wish Time Machine had iSCSI Initiator but it looks like SMB is the only option for Mac at the moment.
A few notes about Google Drive. It’s conveniently cheap storage but it’s a privacy disaster. Unlike Microsoft and Apple, Google DOES have access to all your data, DOES access it without your consent and DOES use it against you. And yeah, it’s all legal cause that’s what you have agreed to in terms and that’s what they pretend to excercise for your “protection”. So just don’t use it unless you don’t really care. And throw away your Android and your GoogleBook if you do.
Cheers.
P.S. OFC you can use Blu Ray burner for extra mile but that’s manual regular action where we all fail and never do, so don’t count on it.