An unencrypted backup is a surveillance bonus — everything you protected on your devices, sitting unprotected on a backup drive or in someone else’s cloud. This guide does it properly.
Backups are the most overlooked privacy surface in most setups. People encrypt their devices, use private messengers, switch browsers — and then back everything up to an unencrypted external drive or a cloud service that can read every file. The result is that whatever was protected on the device is unprotected on the backup, defeating much of the original effort.
This guide builds a proper encrypted backup practice: the 3-2-1 strategy (three copies, two media, one off-site), choosing a backup tool that does encryption right (Restic and Borg are the standards), managing the encryption key (which is everything — lose it and the backup is useless), automating the whole thing so it actually happens, making backups resilient to ransomware, and testing recovery before you need it. Everything in plain language.
Written from a working backup setup that has restored data more than once. Not theoretical — the same backup practice this business depends on every day.
Anyone who has data they would hate to lose — photos, documents, work, the records of a life — and who wants that data backed up without handing copies to surveillance-based companies. Beginners welcome.
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