Back It Up, Again: What’s Changed Since 2020

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TEC367: Six years ago, in TEC075, the worst case was a dead hard drive. Today the bigger risks are your own sync copying a corrupted or deleted file everywhere, ransomware reaching any drive that’s plugged in, and getting locked out of the Google or Apple account that holds everything you own.

Dom Bettinelli and Pat Scott grade their old advice. The core still holds: the 3-2-1 backup rule of three copies, two kinds of local storage and one off-site, plus old versions you can restore from. CISA’s ransomware guidance adds two words most home setups skip: offline and tested. Pat explains how she tests a restore without risking the original files.

On Windows, the tools moved under them. Macrium Reflect Free is gone, and Pat now recommends EaseUS Todo Backup Free for disk images, versioned file backups and folder sync. The new Windows Backup app is OneDrive sync rather than a disk image, and its 5 GB free tier strands her clients’ uploads and pushes them toward a subscription.

On the Mac, Time Machine still works best to a directly attached drive, and SuperDuper! and Carbon Copy Cloner remain the cloning tools. For phones, an iCloud or Google backup protects the device but isn’t a second copy of your photos, so keep the originals on at least one machine your regular backup reaches.

In the cloud, Backblaze costs more than it did in 2020 but now includes a year of version history if you turn it on, while it no longer backs up cloud-sync folders. Pat compares it with Carbonite and IDrive for Windows households, and the two explain why a one-way backup service is different from a cloud drive that mirrors your deletions. For account lockouts there’s Google Takeout and Apple’s data copy at privacy.apple.com, a last resort rather than a plan.

They close by testing four common backup myths and laying out a minimum setup for Windows users, Mac users and phone-first households.

For Picks of the Week, Pat recommends the Twelve South AirFly Drive, which makes wired CarPlay and Android Auto wireless, and Dom recommends Parachute Backup, a Mac app that backs up iCloud Drive and iCloud Photos to a drive you own.

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