Backups: Your Safety Net Against Ransomware
A good backup turns a catastrophe into an inconvenience. Here is the simple rule for doing it right.
Some failures cannot be prevented, only survived. A failed hard drive, a stolen laptop, or ransomware that encrypts all your files can wipe out years of photos and documents in an instant. The only reliable defense is a backup, and the difference between having one and not is the difference between an inconvenience and a disaster.
The time-tested approach is the rule of three, two, one. Keep three copies of anything you care about, on two different types of storage, with one copy kept off-site or in the cloud. In practice for most people this means the working copy on your device, a backup on an external drive at home, and a backup with a reputable cloud service. If any one of these fails or is destroyed, the others remain.
Ransomware deserves special mention. It works by encrypting your files and demanding payment, and it specifically tries to reach connected backups too. The protection is a backup that is not always connected, such as an external drive you plug in only during backups, or a cloud service that keeps version history so you can roll back to before the infection. With that in place, ransomware loses its leverage entirely; you simply restore and move on.
Set backups to run automatically, then occasionally test that you can actually restore a file. A backup you have never verified is a hope, not a safety net.
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