Forget the Cloud: Why I Back Up the Old-School Way
Paranoia, inertia, and other reasons to avoid cloud backup
These days, if you admit that you make physical backups, you’ll get some curious looks. It’s not all that different from telling someone you harvest your own honey or still collect CDs. (I would say records, but everyone knows that records are back as a popular collectible item.)
The typical computer user of today doesn’t make any backups, except for the ones that apps like Google Photos impose. Most young people don’t even understand the concept of backups, because their documents are already in the warm embrace of an online document portal like Google Docs or OneDrive. They never see a Windows Explorer window — and even if they did, none of their stuff would be inside.
Why back up offline?
The first question is simple: Why bother? Cloud backup services work quietly in the background, with no intervention and little chance of error. And once your data is online, it’s truly off-site and invulnerable to careless accidents (stepping on your server) or black swan disasters (a meteor striking your house).
But there are some reasons you might decide to make backups like it’s 2001:
- Paranoia: You don’t want your sensitive…
