Are you prepared for the worst?

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The recent fires in Los Angeles are far enough away that I will feel no impact, either personally or professionally. But I know people in that area. T
[See the full post at: Are you prepared for the worst?]

Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher

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Norio, LHiggins, Toa Of Justice, Deo, lmacri, dataman1701, AlphaCharlie, KWGuy

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I might add try to keep at least one image backup in a different offsite location to your device so fire or theft won’t result in complete data loss.
These include swapping drives or using a cloud backup service.

All comes down to how important your data is on your computer or smart device.

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Can’t stress the “off-site” in “off-site backup” enough. Your off-site backup should be far, far away from where your machine is—preferably thousands of miles away, on the other side of the continent, or on the other side of the planet (okay, maybe not that far). Preferably find a cloud backup service that allows you to set an encryption key that only you have, so no one else can decrypt your backups. Then, if they let you choose a data region to store your off-site backups in, choose one that’s reasonably far away to survive large regional disasters.

Yes, it may take some time to backup to off-site storage, and it may take time to restore from off-site backup, but it’s intended to be your absolute last resort, in case your machine and on-site backups go up in smoke along with your house. It may take time, but at least it’s not gone forever.

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Regular [rotated] backups of ALL data you value/cannot easily restore are essential.

The frequency at which you backup/rotate will likely determine the pain [or lack-thereof] you feel when the backup is needed.

Things to keep in mind:

1. Always encrypt data BEFORE uploading/copying to disk.
2. Don’t rely on specific hardware (eg. TPM, HSM, etc.)  or services for your encryption keys. Determine a way to derieve your key(s) independent of any auxillary hardware/service. That hardware/service may be toast when you need them later.
3. Backup data in a cascading fashion:NetworkShare->ExternalDisk->DetachedDisk->Tape
   Rotate storage so you always have at least two copies of each backup (on different media)
4. Be certain the backup locations [aside from network share] are NOT accessible without human or physical automation authentication
5. Routinely rotate backups [eg. Monthly] to different locations
   1. Many banks will rent vault space — consider safety deposit boxes as a location to stash [encrypted] copies of your backups
   2. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket — spread them out geographically and across multiple states/countries.
6. Don’t rely soley on the cloud for anything important.
7. Don’t rely soley on any disk for anything important.
8. Don’t get lazy and forget to rotate backups. Get into a routine of rotating backups on (e.g. Thursdays — or the first Thursday of every month, …)
9. Periodically test backups

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Still Anonymous

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To be clear, I see two issues here. Are you concerned with recovering ALL your data or are you concerned with rebooting your digital life?

This article is about the latter.
How to Recover When You Lose Everything Traveling by Leo A. Notenboom January 17, 2025
https://askleo.com/how-to-recover-when-you-lose-everything-traveling/

Rebooting your digital life may be harder because you have to decide both what information to keep and where/how to securely keep it.

 

Get up to speed on router security at RouterSecurity.org and Defensive Computing at DefensiveComputingChecklist.com

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This one hits really close to home for me. I lived and worked for several years in one of the affected areas. Where I was was in evacuation warning area, and I think there weren’t any buildings lost. But far too close.

When I was there, my backup procedure including regularly taking backup tapes to another building and storing in a vault. The vault might have been enough to prevent damage to the tapes, but would have been iffy, and my computer room and the other building are close enough together that for this fire, if one had burned, likely that both would have burned.

For backups, it’s easy to advocate to just back up everything to the cloud, but I believe that for a situation like this, cloud backups are inadequate. Too many potential points of failure between the computer and the backup data. I do know that in some places, power was shut down to lessen danger to firefighters (and possibly lowering risk of new fires amid the high winds), but that also removed any capacity of using equipment that relies on publicly-supplied power (and a lot of rooftop solar also damaged/destroyed). Plus telecom infrastructure damaged, as well — not only wired connections (even if underground), but also cell towers. In the Altadena fire, I know that the fire burned to the very edge of the Mt Wilson antenna farm, where some number of television and radio stations broadcast from.

As for backups themselves, it’s essential to do regular testing, to ensure that backed-up data can be recovered. Over a lot of years, I’ve found that assuming that data is recoverable without testing is foolish. There are lots of ways that backups can fail, including bad media, bad backup procedures (e.g., essential data not included in backups), bad backup hardware and more. If you haven’t proven through testing that you can recover your data, you don’t know that you have backups. Cloud backups add several more potential points of failure.

In that perspective, I believe that a single backup tool or methodology are inadequate. Although this particular one is focused on what happens if everything gets incinerated (and Michael’s point about the difference between recovering corporate assets and restarting personal life is well-taken), it’s important to remember that there are a lot of different recovery scenarios, and one tool or methodology may be great for one recovery, but more difficult for another.

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The checklist link in the original post returns “Authorization Failed”.  I even located this website (https://www.aicpa-cima.com/resources/article/disaster-financial-issues-tools-to-help-with-disaster-recovery) and the download buttons are greyed out. Seems one has to be a signed-in member to download? I’ve located other such lists but am curious what AICPA has to say.

Win10 Pro x64 22H2, Win10 Home 22H2, Linux Mint + a cat with 'tortitude'.

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Steve S., I was able to access this PDF the day Susan posted her topic; however, I just tried again and got the same result as you. Attached is the 6-page PDF.

disasters-fp-guide-checklist

Win 7 SP1 Home Premium 64-bit; Office 2010; Group B (SaS); Former 'Tech Weenie'

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satrow

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disasters-and-financial-planning-guide
Here is the full download.

Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher

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SueW

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Susan Bradley wrote:

Are you prepared for the worst?

In January 2011, my family and I survived a house fire.  Two PCs and a DSL modem were destroyed in the fire, but I was prepared.  I had to buy a new modem.  I had everything else covered.  The PCs were both DIY, and I didn’t want to take the time to do the rebuild, so I bought a Dell desktop and restored one of the PCs to it.  I was running Windows 7 Ultimate at the time, which was transferable.

I bought a Dell laptop and restored the OS and other pertinent programs from the other PC to that laptop.  Eventually, when I had time, I did the DIY thing and got my entire digital life completely restored.  For me, partitioning/compartmentalizing are the key.  There are different backup requirement levels for different data.  Partitioning Options help in the organization of data.

Always create a fresh drive image before making system changes/Windows updates; you may need to start over!

We all have our own reasons for doing the things that we do with our systems; we don't need anyone's approval, and we don't all have to do the same things.

We were all once "Average Users".

Computer Specs

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TechTango

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