わたしの部屋

The rule, in plain words#

3 copies of anything you can’t lose. 2 different types of storage. 1 copy somewhere else physically.

Photos on your phone are one copy. Photos on your phone that sync to a cloud account are two copies but arguably one location if both live in the same ecosystem on one account. The external drive adds the independent second medium; the “somewhere else” covers the house-fire case.

That’s the entire theory. Everything below is just implementation.

What we actually protect#

Not everything needs three copies — that way lies madness. The can’t-lose list:

• Photos and videos (about 40 GB per year for us)
• Documents: passports scans, insurance, tax returns, mortgage, warranties
• The password manager’s emergency kit (already paper, but also in the document set)

Everything else — apps, music streaming caches, reinstallable software — is not backed up, because it doesn’t need to be. Deciding what not to protect is half the work.

The setup, start to finish#

Phone photos → cloud (automatic). Whatever platform the phone is on, its built-in photo backup does the job. The critical check: open the settings and confirm the last successful backup date, and confirm it’s backing up video, which some default configurations skip. Then check the storage tier actually covers the library size — a “storage full, backup paused” banner is how silent zero-backup states begin.

Computer + documents → external drive (automatic-ish). One external SSD, plugged into the desktop. The built-in backup tools (File History on Windows, Time Machine on Mac) do versioned backups when the drive is present. I leave ours plugged in permanently; if you unplug yours, calendar a weekly “plug in the drive” reminder and treat it as sacred.

The off-site copy (once a quarter). This is the part people skip, and it’s the only part that covers fire and flood. Ours is boring: a second external drive in a desk drawer at my in-laws’, swapped with the home drive every three months. Encrypted with the drive’s built-in encryption, so the off-site copy being “out of the house” isn’t a privacy problem.

WARNING

An encrypted off-site drive protects the contents if the drive is lost. A cloud account protects nothing if its single password is also saved in that same cloud account’s password reset email. The backup chain is only as strong as its recovery path — test that you can actually get in.

The quarterly routine (15 minutes)#

1. Swap the off-site drive, bring the fresh one home.
2. Check the cloud backup’s “last successful” date.
3. Open one random photo from three years ago from the external drive. Actually open it. A backup you have never restored from is a hypothesis, not a backup.
4. New documents (this year’s tax return, the new insurance policy) dragged into the documents folder that gets backed up.

Calendar reminder does the remembering; the routine takes one coffee.

What this doesn’t cover (and why that’s OK)#

Ransomware that encrypts the cloud-synced copies and the attached external drive simultaneously — the real argument for air-gapped rotation — is a risk I accept at household scale, because the quarterly off-site rotation means worst case we lose three months, and the probability doesn’t justify a fourth copy’s complexity. If you keep medical or business records on a home machine, weight that decision differently.

Business-grade setups exist for businesses. For a family, the goal is not a bulletproof architecture; it’s never having to tell anyone that the first six years of a kid’s photos lived on a phone that went into the pool. This setup achieves that for one drive, one subscription we already had, and fifteen minutes a quarter.

The one-sentence version#

Photos to the cloud automatically, everything else to a plugged-in drive automatically, and a second drive that sleeps in a drawer at a relative’s house and comes home four times a year.