By Randall Deetz, on Apr 4, 2021
Most people now rely solely on cloud backup to protect their documents and data, not realizing that a disaster such as a hard drive crash or malware attack can bring their system down for days. The costs for recovering a downed system that’s offline could be hundreds or even thousands of dollars for some companies. Many home users may simply throw out their PC and buy a new one, regardless of how recently they purchased the downed system. Thousands of drives crash every day, including SSDs. Our office had an external SSD crash a month after we purchased it. Rotating drives will often give you an audible warning that it’s having troubles, such as clicking sounds or grinding noises. When an SSD crashes, more then likely you’ll have no warning whatsoever.
Full-system backup is the best way to protect against malware, hardware failure, and ransomware attacks, and is generally unavailable in the cloud. There’s numerous backup solutions that will perform an image backup of your system. These backups may take hours to complete, but will allow you to fully recover from a disaster. You’ll need to create special recovery media on a flash drive or other external media. This will allow you to boot a special recovery environment if the system fails. It’s critical to have access to this media when a disaster strikes. If your system crashes and can’t reboot, you won’t be able to recover without it. Booting your recovery media may also pose problems as some PCs won’t boot from a flash drive if the internal drive isn’t completely dead. This will require making a BIOS change, which many users may find difficult to manage. Once you figure out how to get up and running in the recovery environment, the restore process could take a few hours to complete. Most backup solutions do a great job of backing up your system, but backups do fail. A small percentage of backups may have issues and won’t restore properly. If so, it might be time to head to your IT department, or local repair shop for help.
Fear not however, as Rescue Drive is the only backup solution available that allows you to recover instantly from a disaster, and you can do so without recovery media! It’s also the only solution that allows you to check if the backup can successfully recover your system immediately after you make your initial backup. The value of this can’t be underestimated. There’s numerous horror stories, especially in the tape backup world where it’s discovered that a backup didn’t complete properly and was worthless at the time it was needed the most.
So other then instant recovery, why else would you want to backup to a local drive connected to a USB port versus cloud backup? One word, security. A local backup to an external drive won’t expose your data to a public cloud. Do you really want your financial records and other sensitive information exposed to hackers or intrusions from government agencies without your knowledge? The benefits of cloud backup don’t outweigh the costs in our opinion, especially when the alternative is backing up to a Rescue Drive.
Rescue Drive Versus Cloud Backup
Ease of Use
Free of Monthly Charges
Instant Recovery from Disasters
Full-System Restore
Privacy & Security Maximized
Access Your Data Anywhere
No Extra Hardware Required
If a disaster strikes and you rely only on cloud backup, you will be in for a world of hurt for the next few days or even weeks as you experience the pain of a downed PC. Why not avoid the associated horror and just install Rescue Drive? For the love of all things computing, don’t wait for a disaster and become just another sad statistic. For those still critical of dumping the cloud for our truly awesome Rescue Drive solution, let’s take a look at the last two strikes against Rescue Drive versus cloud backup listed above.
Access Your Data Anywhere
With Rescue Drive, you can’t access your data while traveling, or access it from another PC without carrying around an external drive. How often do you really need to access your data on another PC? OneDrive, Drop Box, and similar services allow you to share documents in the cloud. This enables access to your data on mobile devices, or anywhere else for that matter. This is convenient for many types of documents, but not financial data, tax information, and even family photos. This type of data shouldn’t be included in a remote backup, and doesn’t belong being stored in a public cloud. The tradeoff for the portability of cloud backup is privacy and security.
No Extra Hardware Required
Rescue Drive does require that you purchase an external USB drive that you can perform full-system backups to. The cost of these drives have continued to go down, and are usually less then the annual cost of most cloud backup subscriptions. Rescue Drive supports large capacity flash drives, external SSD drives, and even SD cards on some PCs. Many of the latest external SSDs will actually boot as fast or faster through the USB port then booting the system from the internal drive. You do need to remember to connect your Rescue Drive however, and many users won’t like to deal with a flash drive sticking out of the side of their PC, or deal with the length of the USB cable that comes with some external drives.
All Hail the Rise of New FIT Drives!
FIT drives are compact drives that contain flash memory with an integrated USB interface. These drives are fast, have a small footprint (they’re tiny), and are now available in ever increasing capacities. We really like the new SanDisk 512GB FIT drive. It has just enough capacity to create a full-system backup on most of our PCs. Best of all, a Rescue Drive backup to a FIT is bootable! A FIT drive will also allow you to keep your backup drive continuously connected, which means that you’ll never need to remember to connect your drive for backups. Rescue Drive supports scheduling both full-system and incremental backups, so similar to your cloud backups, you simply set it, and forget it.
Unfortunately, there’s still one negative aspect to this configuration… a storage drive that is always connected is vulnerable to ransomware strikes.
Ransomware Protection
Fortunately, the good folks at Rescue Drive have already thought about this. Rescue Drive Professional has patent-pending technology called ransomware protection that secures your backup drive from all the nasty variants of this bane to our society. Here’s how it works. Your Rescue Drive (FIT drive for our purposes) is normally hidden from the system. When a backup is launched, the Rescue Drive is re-enabled while the backup process runs. As soon as the backup completes, your Rescue Drive is again disabled and hidden from the system. If ransomware strikes, the disabled backup drive won’t be vulnerable to attack. If your entire system is encrypted and held hostage, all that is required is a simple reboot. After restarting the system, the non-infected Rescue Drive can be selected as your boot device. Your PC will boot normally and allow access to all your applications and connectivity. At this point, you can continue working on your PC as normal until you’re ready to perform a restore. Rescue Drive makes it easy to perform a full-system restore back to your internal drive, or to a new drive if you decide to replace the old one. When the restore completes, simply restart and everything is back to normal, and… ransomware-free.
Just try this with your existing cloud back software and see how far you get. Come on, we dare you!