Backup Your Damn Files!

On the path to profitability, indie hackers face quite a bit of pressure to move rapidly. When this happens, it's easy to overlook some critical vulnerabilities like the potential for data loss.

Anyone who has been the victim of data loss can tell you that there are few things as gut wrenching as losing something you've poured your blood, sweat and tears into. Whether it's ransomware, theft, human error, disk failure, or (god forbid) a house fire, the threat of losing all your digital assets looms over you all the time.

Don't think that it won't happen to you!

Take a day or two to think about what your backup strategy is. A common rule of thumb to follow is something called the 3-2-1 strategy. It says that you should have 3 copies of your data at all times, 2 of which should be located physically inside your house and 1 which should be located physically outside it.

For example, if you want to protect your tax documents using this strategy, you should have 1 copy on your computer (the original), 1 copy on an external hard drive or NAS device, and 1 copy on storage outside your house (cloud storage, friend's computer, server, etc).

A solid backup strategy is something everyone should have but for a small bootstrapped internet company, it could be the difference between surviving to fight another day or giving up on your dreams.

The list of tools claiming to help you solve this problem in 2020 is long (very long). I wrote a short guide for picking the right backup tool that will hopefully be of help to anyone who is interested:

https://bimbashrestha.medium.com/what-file-backup-software-is-best-f7d20178db39

Full disclosure, one of the products on that guide is ours:)