Backups

After a couple of incidents where we've lost information that we've had stored on a smartphone, we set aside today to do some backup planning and implementation.

For our phones, we've decided to backup to our computers using "Smart Switch" - a tool that is designed to be used to switch from one phone to another, but it seems to work for backing up data and then being able to restore it later.

Of course, backing up our phones to our computers means that we also need to make sure our computer backup strategy is sound. Having our computers and the backups on the bus seems a little too dangerous given the types of disasters that might occur to the bus.

We had thought that we would do backups of our computers to a cloud storage location, and had started looking into that at the end of last year... but... with the recent attention that Verizon has been giving to unlimited data plans that are using data in the 100G area, we decided that a backup plan that had us uploading a large amount of data would not be in our best interest.

Other options that we have seen people use are to back up to an external hard drive and ship that hard drive somewhere - either to a friend or family member and have it returned on some regular basis, or to their mail forwarding service, and have it returned on some regular basis. Or, to have two external hard drives and keep one in the tow vehicle (Jee-rage) and the other on the bus, and swap them regularly - with the theory that both vehicles are not likely to be destroyed in the same incident. Folks who are doing computer work from their RVs (income producing) are probably more concerned about their backups than we will need to be.

We've decided to go with the "two external hard drives, storing one in the Jeep and one on the bus" as our backup strategy for now. Although we have a couple of external hard drives, neither is big enough to store full backups plus incrementals of both of our computers, so we ordered two 5TB external hard drives from Amazon today. I don't want to have to make decisions about what to back up based on running out of disk space. I want to do full system backups to protect in case of system failure as well as backing up specific files and folders for ease of restoring just one or more files in case of user error.

As I've been typing this, I thought about potentially having a fire safe to keep the hard drives in the Jeep - we might order one of those too (Amazon Basics have some in various sizes that look like a good price performer).

We also have the photos that we've been scanning in stored in Amazon cloud storage - they offer free storage for photos and videos for Amazon Prime members. Hopefully uploading those items won't put us over any data limits for Verizon.

We're finishing up the evening reviewing our legal documents (wills, financial power of attorney, medical power of attorney). We've been working on them with our attorney (experienced with fulltime RVers) for a while... maybe we'll get them completed during 2017!!!!