Cyber Security: Backups & Encryption

[Music] welcome to another video from explaining computers this time i'm returning to the subject of cyber security specifically i'm going to discuss the best ways to back up your data as well as to make sure that it doesn't fall into the wrong hands please note that this video focuses on strategies for private individuals and small businesses and not on the requirements of larger companies and data centers today most people have personal digital content including documents photographs and videos that would be impossible to replace if they were lost the starting point for protecting such data should be a review of the threats it faces which include ssd hard drive or other media failure secondary hardware failures such as a broken power supply that destroys a drive or corrupts the data on it physical damage to media or a computer fire flood lightning strikes and natural disasters power surges or outages theft or accidental loss of computers or media ransomware viruses and other malware hackers and finally user error for example if somebody accidentally deletes a file or reformats a drive that's not backed up whilst user error is by far the most common reason for data loss all of these threats regularly destroyed data in 2008 journalist jack schofield subsequently coined his second law of computing in which he stated that data doesn't really exist unless you have at least two copies of it this is a statement i both agree with and live by so what's the best backup plan other than making backups in the first place the key thing for individuals is to decide how to divide copies of their data between four personal data storage categories these are local online storage local offline storage remote offline storage and cloud storage here local online storage refers to all drives inside your computer or which are located in network attached storage units or home servers that are constantly running local offline storage next refers to ssds hard drives and other media but are not powered up or connected to a computer most of the time but which are kept on site remote offline storage then refers to unpowered disconnected media that are kept off site and finally cloud storage refers to internet services that include google drive dropbox and microsoft's onedrive as well as dedicated online backup services critically any backup plan that only uses local online storage is very risky indeed this is because local online drives are constantly exposed to all of the threats noted in the last section of this video so for example if you only store data on your computer and on a network storage device then a single power failure ransomware attack user error hacker attack or lightning strike could destroy all copies of your data often people tell me that data backed up on their nas or network attached storage device is very safe indeed this they claim is because they use a raid or redundant array of independent disks that duplicates their data across different drives but this only protects them against a single drive failure as all of the other threats i've mentioned can destroy data held in a raid setup just as easily as data held on a single drive smart ransomware for example will encrypt the files on your nas or server before those on your c drive and a power surge or lightning strike will happily thrive a lot so it's important that some of your backups are kept on local or remote offline storage or in the cloud for many years there's been a very helpful piece of backup guidance called the three two one rule this states that we should keep at least three copies of our data on at least two different media and with at least one copy kept off site so for example we may have the original or working version of a file saved on a pc's ssd or hard drive a second copy on an external hard drive and a third copy stored online this makes use of local online local offline and cloud storage and meets the 3-2-1 rule by providing three copies of the data on at least two different media with one copy retained off-site there are of course many permutations for example your first backup could be stored on local online storage whilst the off-site files may be on a flash drive kept at a friend's house or even kept on your person as this at least provides an off-site copy when you leave home to improve on 321 you may also keep more than three backups and use more types of media so for example you may store data on your computer on a nas on backup dvd or blu-ray discs and with a cloud vendor to achieve 431 and indeed you may also choose to use multiple cloud vendors for example backing up files to google drive and onedrive to achieve 532 in this context it's worth noting that whilst data saved with cloud providers like microsoft dropbox and google is backed up in their data centers whether or not this provides multiple copies under the 3-2-1 rule depends on how you choose to use the service if for example you synchronize a local drive to cloud storage then if you accidentally delete a local file the online backup will also be deleted usually it goes into a trash folder and is kept for 30 days so you may get it back in this period but if you rely on cloud storage as your off-site backup a synchronization strategy is very risky indeed personally i keep a lot of off-site backups in the cloud but i do this by uploading files manually and never synchronize a local drive over the years many different backup media have been available for home and small business use but today the choice for non-cloud storage generally comes down to internal or external hard drives or ssds optical disks usb drives and flash memory cards all of these can be used for making backups that should last for a couple of years and probably far more however if you want to make long-term backups it's wise to avoid ssds usb thumb drives and memory cards and instead store your data on hard drives or optical disks and if you do back up to cd dvd or blu-ray note that write once rather than rewritable media have a longer shelf life how and where backups are stored is also important so think about where your backups can be kept to best protect them from accidental damage theft and other hazards internal hard drives used for backups can be safely stored in anti-static cases although i keep some of my own drives in peli cases that protect against a potential water leak or flood you may even want to keep some of your backups in a fire safe however these are not infallible so it's usually cheaper and safer to protect against fire with off-site backups so far in this video we've been focusing on preventing data loss by making backups however it's often just as important to ensure that your data doesn't fall into the wrong hands for several decades now i've been carrying on my person discs or memory cards or usb flash drives like this one as part of my personal backup strategy and just over 10 years ago a drive like this fell out of my pocket at work i lost it now fortunately the drive was found in a corridor by a colleague who looked at the files on the drive worked out they were mine and got the drive back to me and that was fantastic but ever since that time i've never carried on my person any form of media on which the files weren't encrypted now the reason of course i'm telling you this story is to make the broader point that whenever you save a file to a particular media you should always ask yourself how likely is it that that media will fall into the wrong hands and if it is likely and you wouldn't like the consequences then do make sure that your files are encrypted various options are available for encrypting your data for start most office software allows individual file encryption so for example if you have financial or other sensitive information stored in an excel spreadsheet you can select file info protect workbook and encrypt with a password to make sure that nobody else can read your file even if they obtain a copy the pro and enterprise editions of windows also include a form of whole drive encryption called bitlocker however bitlocker is not included in the home editions of windows and personally i use the free open source program veracrypt for encrypting either entire backup drives or more commonly to create encrypted file containers that can be mounted as drives when required a big advantage of vericrypt is that it's available for windows mac and linux the program is the successor to a previous piece of software called truecrypt and can be downloaded from veracrypt.fr and if you're interested i've got a tutorial video called veracrypt encrypted usb drive as an alternative there are usb thumb drives external hard drives and external ssds with internal hardware encryption here i personally rely on drives from datashaw which are very secure and very robust to use a drive the correct passcode needs to be entered on its keypad after which the device can be used as a normal usb drive on any kind of computer in any kind of operating system this means that using a hardware encrypted drive is a good option if you need to access files on android and other mobile devices as well as on desktop pcs and laptops backing up and encrypting data has never been easier or cheaper and so today the key investment required to keep your data safe is some of your own human time sadly many people don't realize how important their data is to them until they've lost it and so please do remember the 3-2-1 rule and keep at least three copies of your important data on at least two different media with one of those copies of your data being off-site and the off-site copy can be as simple as files saved on an encrypted usb drive and stored with a family member or a friend or file saved in the cloud but now that's it for another video we've enjoyed what you've seen here please plus that like button if you haven't subscribed please subscribe and i hope to talk to you again very soon [Music] you

Channel: ExplainingComputers

Views: 81,567

Keywords: computer security, backup policy, backup strategy, back-up strategy, backing up youd data, 3-2-1 rule, 321 rule, 321 backup rule, 321 back-up rule, Christopher Barnatt, VeraCrypt, backup media, NAS backups, NAS back-ups, cloud backups, cloud back-ups

Id: uEP9GTs1lZs

Length: 12min 54sec (774 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 14 2021