How to back your things up

Posted on 28 July 2023

Uh oh, you have some data you need to back up and save. Here's a failproof way to backup your data that I use and has saved me many times.

Don't use the „cloud”

The cloud is someone else's computer, and can often fail if you don't have your password: and you don't know what they are doing with your data. As well, it is very hard to restore from the cloud, so I reccomend using a hard drive that you own.

Get tools

I reccomend getting a laptop HDD and a 2.5 inch (6.35cm, but sadly HDD units are in US inches) SATA HDD to USB converter. For the hard drive I reccomend this one and for the converter, I reccomend this one: for this one, the cord looks weird, but a micro USB will plug in and work if you cannot find the cord that it came with. (You can use different ones, but as a rule of thumb, be absolutely sure you are getting a 2.5 inch HDD (also called a laptop HDD) (do NOT get an SSD! These are faster but less reliable and more expensive) and a 2.5 inch SATA to USB converter. However, if you have an old-ish laptop that you can't use anymore and you're willing to dissassemble it and take the data off it, you can recycle a laptop hard drive. (That's actually what I did instead of buying new. I still reccomend buying an internal HDD and a converter over an external, as it is much cheaper.)

Set up

Now you have an empty hard drive and a USB enclosure. On your computer, "format" the empty HDD as "exFAT", not anything else! (This ensures it works on all devices.) Then we can back up our files!

Back up files

Android

If you want to back up your photos, copy your /DCIM/Camera folder to the HDD. This might take an extremely long time, so do not plan on using your phone while this happens. If you want to back up app data, that can't be simply done with the HDD method, but you can get a KeePass app (e.g. KeePassDX) and back up that KeePass file to save your passwords.

UNIX systems and Mac

It's a good idea to copy your whole home folder (t.ex. /home/turtle) to the hard drive, so if you set up a new computer, you can just replace your home folder and start from there.

Windows

Same as above, but the file location is different (t.ex C:\Users\turtle).

Restore your files

Uh oh, something happened, and you need to restore your files. Just copy the folder back into the file system in the same place and you're good to go. How easy!

I hope you can get some use out of this and stop backing up to the cloud with this. Ha en fin dag!