How safe is the data on your home computer?

Originally published in GP magazine .

Written for GP magazine around 2010. This is the version I submitted - the published article may have been edited.

Do you work at home? Is the data on your home computer safe? At work it might all be taken care of - your IT department may have set your home directory to a network drive that is backed up, and all the data on your clinical system should be backed up and validated regularly, but most of that happens without you thinking about it. At home there is no one to do this for you.

There is a range of options if you want to make sure that the data you have on your home computer is safe.

Keep important information backed up on a USB memory stick. 8GB ones aren’t difficult to find and should be enough to save any number of Word documents or PowerPoint presentations. Some are even encrypted, and best of all you can take your backup with you, so you can access it when you need it and it’s safe if your house gets burgled or burns down.

As good as memory sticks are, most people will want to back up their personal data as well as work stuff, and even a big memory stick might not be big enough. The usual backup device these days is an external hard disk. They are cheap and cheerful - they plug in to a USB port and are easy to use. Some are even powered through the USB cable and are portable enough to take with you.

For added safety there is now a range of double hard disks available which you can use as backup devices. These external devices have two disks in them. You are usually given two choices in how you set them up. The first is to add the disks together by sending alternate bits of data to each of them, which gives the maximum possible storage space and speed but at twice the risk, as if one of the disks crashes you lose all your data. Or you can send the data to one and it is automatically mirrored to the other, which keeps an exact copy. In this configuration your data is effectively held on three disks including the original, and some may think this is overkill, but many including me are paranoid about hard disk crashes and this is the setup I have at home.

If not overkill, then the double disk system can be considered inefficient, in that you may have bought two disks but you only get the size of one. There is another option, which is called a RAID array. In this box you can have three or four or more disks. The data is split up between the disks in such a way as to have a level of redundancy, and if one disk crashes the system just carries on. Usually the user is alerted and you can take out the bad drive and put in a new one. Arrays with five and more disks can lose two disks before data is at risk. While this may seem overkill for backing up a few Word documents, and is probably more than a GP’s home office needs, if you have a lot of video or photos it can have its advantages.

All of the methods above involve connecting the device direct to the computer you are backing up. Most of them are also available in networkable form, where you connect them to your network and access them over that. The biggest disadvantage is usually that the speed of transferring files is much slower, but often there are clever features built in, like the ability to access the files from the internet, and these devices could be considered mini servers.

So far, with the exception of the USB stick that you take with you, the other devices have been at home and have been vulnerable to theft or damage. The cloud is now an alternative for backing up your data. There are plenty of online storage sites; most offer several gigabytes of free storage, which should be enough for backing up your home work. These are stored in data centres where great care is taken. If you are paranoid you might save your data in more than one of them. Remember, though, that these are often sited in other countries where there may be different privacy laws. The biggest disadvantage of online sites is the speed of uploading data. Most broadband in the UK has very slow upload speeds, and while uploading a PowerPoint presentation would be fine, if you wanted to upload a lot of personal stuff too it would take ages. Some of these sites even have internet browser access, meaning you can get at your data from any computer and not need a team of pigeons.

The software you use to manage your backups is very important. You want it to be automatic, up to date (there is nothing worse than losing a document you wrote last week that isn’t on the backup you made three months ago) and efficient in terms of speed and the resources it uses. When storing your data, think about encryption; however, the methods used are often proprietary and you are then reliant on the company and software remaining solvent.