I don’t have a backup. Can you help?

Yes — and if you’re reading this before something has gone wrong, you’re in the good position. Most of the people who ask us this are asking afterwards.

You may have less than you think

A few things people believe are backups, which aren’t:

“It’s all on iCloud / OneDrive / Google Drive.” Sync is not backup. If you delete a file, it deletes everywhere. If something corrupts it, the corruption syncs. Sync protects you from losing a device; it does not protect you from a mistake.

“I copied it to an external drive.” Good — when? A backup from 2022 is a 2022 backup. And a drive that lives permanently plugged into the computer will be taken by the same fire, theft or ransomware.

“I’ve got two copies on the same computer.” One drive failure removes both.

“The photos are on my phone.” Then your photos live on the single most easily lost, stolen, dropped and drowned object you own.

The rule worth knowing

Professionals use 3-2-1, and it scales down to a household perfectly well:

• 3 copies of anything you’d hate to lose
• on 2 different kinds of storage
• with 1 of them somewhere else

In practice, for most people: the files on your computer, an external drive that lives in a drawer, and a cloud service. That’s it. It isn’t complicated and it isn’t expensive.

The “somewhere else” matters more than it sounds. Fire, flood and burglary take everything in the room, and the external drive next to the computer goes with it.

What to protect first

If doing all of it feels like too much, start here — in order of what people actually grieve:

1. Photos and video. Irreplaceable. Everything else is an inconvenience; this is the one that makes people cry in the workshop.
2. Documents — anything financial, legal or work-related.
3. Email, if it’s stored on the computer rather than webmail.
4. Everything else. Programs can be reinstalled. Files can’t.

The test everyone skips

An untested backup is a hope, not a backup.

Once it’s set up, open something from it. Restore one photo, one document. We have seen backups running faithfully for years that turned out to contain nothing usable, and the moment you discover that should not be the moment you need it.

Put a reminder in your calendar to check it twice a year. It takes five minutes.

If something has already gone wrong

Don’t keep using the machine. If a drive is failing, every hour it runs reduces what can be recovered.

Turn it off and bring it in. Data recovery and transfer starts from £102, and the honest position is that outcomes depend entirely on what’s failed — a computer that won’t boot usually has perfectly intact files, while a physically failed drive is a harder and less certain job. We’ll tell you which you’re facing before you commit to anything.

Setting it up once, properly

Bring the computer and, if you have one, the external drive. We’ll set up something automatic that doesn’t depend on you remembering, show you how to check it, and make sure the things that matter most are the things actually being protected.

It is the cheapest insurance in computing, and the only repair we can never promise to do is the one where there was no backup.

Workshop on Station Road, no appointment needed, or ring 01753 884700.