When I got my first personal computer, I knew I needed a way to back up my files in case anything were to happen to it. This was from first hand experience having broken our family computers a few times.

I kept my usernames and passwords in a word document which I printed every few months. For files I’d used a re-writeable CD, then DVD, and eventually a USB drive. I maxed out at around a 32GB drive in high school and that held all the data I had at the time of mostly MySpace and Facebook pictures.

When I started my undergrad I was using a 64GB USB drive and was looking at getting a dedicated eternal SSD. As part of our school’s Google Suite account we also had unlimited Google Drive Storage. This was a savior since I also learned about the 3-2-1 Backup Rule around this time as well.

My first attempt at getting everything uploaded to Google Drive was a pain. Talking with some classmates one had a similar problem, and also had a worse expeirence with data loss, so they knew where I was going. They showed me rclone which is a CLI tool that uploaded files to any cloud provider faster than any web app. It also allowed you to encrypt the files on the remote end to protect them even if your cloud account was compromised.

During my undergrad I only had my laptop so I didn’t have to worry about syncing files between devices. When I graduated and started working I almost exclusivley used my desktop, so I didn’t worry about sycning files on my desktop.

Since I used rclone with Linux during my undergrad, I did the same with my Windows 10 desktop by making a dedicated VM. This worked for me because 1) I could encrypt the VM drive without having to encrypt my OS drive, saving on boot time, and 2) it kept my files secure even if my desktop was compromised.

I didn’t have a flagship smartphone, so I wasn’t taking a lot of pictures, and most of my files were documents. For a while I also backed up my music collection, but stopped since I knew it’d be easier to just download it again than trying to restore it from Google Drive.

When I left for some seasonal work I brought my new personal laptop with me. Before I left I had to transfer the files from my storage VM to it. Then when I got back 3 months later I had to resync them again.

This got me thinking, is all this security worth the effort? I knew that everything I was doing would make me difficult for any targeted attack. But I wasn’t openly involved in any activity that’d make me a target, and the only one suffering from all this was me. Also backing up to my external drive from my storage VM could be an involved process, it often prevented me from wanting to reimage my desktop when I knew that was the easiest way to fix problems I was having.

I’d always talk about my process with friends, and one would say that what I’m doing is overkill and the Google Drive desktop app is about as much as anyone needs. So I caved and reimaged my desktop and started with the Google Drive app.

Google Drive also allows for two types of access 1) Mirror: The files are stored locally and sycned remotely and 2) Stream: The files are all stored remotely, and only downloaded when accessed. To keep with the 3-2-1 rule I went with Mirrored.

The first upload was painful. It slowed down the network for my entire apartment, took three days to finish, and I had to uninstall/reinstall the app a few times to fix syncing issues. In restrospected I could’ve prevented this pain using the rclone Windows client for the initial upload.

Once everything was synced I was set. Now when I work on my laptop, I have access to everything my desktop does. Since I still do a manual back-up to an external hard drive, when I have to reimage my desktop, I download my files to it. Reimage my desktop, transfer everything back, then when I reinstall the Google Drive app, instead of trying to download/upload everything, it just syncs and verifies all the files, and since both are the same and less than a few minutes old it finishes in ~15 minutes.

My current set up might not be as flashy or hacky as when I first started, but the freedom and simplicity it offers me it worth the trade off.