General

A backup you have never restored is a hope, not a backup

The question is not “am I backed up?” It is “when did I last take something out?”

Almost everyone I visit believes they are backed up. Often they are — partly, in a way that covers one of the three ways data actually disappears. It helps to separate them, because a single tool rarely covers all three.

Sync is not backup

This is the single most expensive misunderstanding I run into. iCloud, Google Drive, OneDrive and Dropbox are sync services: their job is to make every device show the same thing. That is genuinely useful, and it does cover a dead laptop. But if you delete a folder on the laptop, sync does its job faithfully and deletes it everywhere else too.

Most of them keep deleted items and older versions for a window — often around 30 days, and it differs by service and by plan. That window is worth knowing, because it is the difference between an inconvenience and a loss. Look up the one you use and write the number down. If the answer is “I don’t know,” treat sync as a convenience and put a real backup underneath it.

Three copies, two kinds of place, one somewhere else

This is the old rule and it still holds. Three copies of anything you would grieve. Two different kinds of storage — say the computer itself and an external drive, so one failure does not take both. One copy off-site, meaning not in the building. For most households that ends up being: the machine, a plug-in drive on the desk, and a cloud backup running quietly in the background.

Built-in tools do most of this well and cost nothing extra. On a Mac, Time Machine plus an external drive gives you versions going back months. On Windows, File History does the same job. Neither is off-site — that is what the third copy is for.

While you are in there, check the date on the most recent backup. A stopped backup almost never announces itself; the icon looks the same. The drill catches that too.

A network that stays up

“The internet is down” is three different problems wearing the same coat.

Before you can fix it you have to know which box is which. Most homes have two or three, and sometimes they are combined into one unit by the provider.

The two-minute triage, in order

Work outward from the smallest thing. Each step tells you something, so resist the urge to reboot everything at once — that fixes the symptom and erases the evidence.

1. Is it one device or all of them? Check a phone on the same WiFi. If the phone is fine, the problem is the one device, and the network is innocent.
2. Is it WiFi or the line? On a phone, turn WiFi off and use cellular. If pages load, your connection to the outside world was never the issue.
3. Look at the lights. Providers put the answer on the front of the box. A steady light usually means the line is healthy; blinking or a different colour usually means it is not. Photograph the normal lights now, while everything works, so you have something to compare against.
4. Then reboot, in order. Modem first. Wait until its lights settle — a couple of minutes, not ten seconds. Then the router. Then the mesh points.
5. If rebooting fixes it every few days, you do not have a solution, you have a symptom on a schedule. That is worth a real look.

Dead zones are usually placement, not hardware

People buy a bigger router to fix a back bedroom, and it often does not help, because the signal was being absorbed rather than running out. WiFi dislikes water, metal and masonry — which means aquariums, mirrors, refrigerators, metal shelving, foil-backed insulation, concrete and tile.

Move the router up and toward the middle of the space it serves. Off the floor, out of the cabinet, not behind the television, not in the closet with the electrical panel. A router in a central hallway at chest height frequently beats a better router in a corner on the ground.

If you do need to extend, a mesh system is generally the better answer than a plug-in repeater. A simple repeater listens and re-shouts on the same channel, which can roughly halve the speed of anything connected to it. And wherever you put the second unit, it needs to be somewhere that still has good signal from the first — halfway between the router and the dead zone, not inside the dead zone.

Power, salt and heat

A flicker too short to notice is a full reboot for the router, and some equipment does not come back cleanly on its own. A small battery backup on the modem and router — the kind that costs less than a night out — rides through flickers and gives the gear a clean shutdown in a real outage. It is the cheapest reliability you can buy.

Near the coast, salt air and humidity are hard on electronics and on every connector. Give boxes air, keep them out of direct sun, and if a connection goes intermittent look at the plug and the cable before you blame the box.

Two settings worth ten minutes

Turn on the guest network and put visitors on it, along with the smart plugs, cameras and televisions. If one of those devices turns out to have a weakness, it is standing in a different room from your laptop and your files.

Change the router’s admin password — the one for the settings page, which is not the same as the WiFi password. Plenty of routers still carry the password printed in the manual. While you are in there, let it install updates automatically if it offers.

Not getting scammed

They all have the same skeleton. Once you can see it, the costume stops mattering.

The pop-up, the phone call, the text about a package, the grandchild in trouble, the email from the bank — the surface changes constantly and there is no point memorising this month’s version. Underneath, almost every one of them does the same three things in the same order.

That single habit defeats nearly all of it, because the whole method depends on you staying inside the channel they opened. A real bank, a real utility and a real shipper are all perfectly happy for you to hang up and call them back.

The tells

• A screen that tells you to call a number. Your computer does not know a phone number for support, and a real error will not give you one. This is the most common one I am called about. It is a web page, not your machine — close the tab, or force-quit the browser if it will not let you.
• A caller who says they are from Microsoft, Apple, or your internet provider, reporting a virus. Those companies do not cold-call households about infections. If someone opens that way, that is the tell, and you owe them nothing — not politeness, not an explanation. Hang up.
• Any request for gift cards, wire transfer, cryptocurrency or payment apps. This is the clearest signal there is. No legitimate refund, fine, tax bill or utility arrears is settled in gift cards. If the conversation reaches this point, it was a scam from the first word.
• “Read me the code I just sent you.” Those codes exist precisely so that only you have them. Anyone asking for one is asking for the key to an account — and that includes someone claiming to be helping you recover it.
• Pressure to stay on the line, or not to tell your spouse, your bank or your family. Urgency plus isolation is the method, not a coincidence.
• A refund that is “too much” and now you must send some back. The screen showing the deposit is a picture, not a transaction.

Remote access, and when it is fine

Screen-sharing tools are ordinary and useful — I use one myself when a house call is not practical. What makes them safe or dangerous is not the tool, it is the direction. Fine: you decided you needed help, you chose who to contact, you reached them through a number or address you already trusted. Not fine: anyone who arrived uninvited and now wants you to install something so they can show you the problem. If a stranger is walking you through installing anything at all, stop there.

Owning your email

Every other account you have resets through this one. It deserves to be the account you guard hardest.

Think about what “forgot password” actually does. It sends a link to your email. That is true of your bank, your insurance, your domain, your photos, your phone account and your business tools. Whoever controls that mailbox can walk into the rest, one reset at a time. It is worth about ten minutes of attention, once.

Renting an address versus owning one

There are three situations, and they are not equally comfortable.

If you run anything commercial on a provider address, that is the piece I would move first — not for appearances, but because it is a dependency you did not choose and cannot control. A domain costs roughly the price of a couple of coffees a year, and it makes your address portable for good.

Moving without losing anything

The fear is understandable and the sequence is gentler than people expect. The trick is that the old address keeps working the whole time — there is no moment where mail can fall on the floor.

1. Set up the new address and get it receiving.
2. Turn on forwarding from the old address to the new one. Now everything arrives in the new place while nothing has changed for anyone writing to you.
3. Live there for a few weeks and watch what comes in. That list — bank, insurance, utilities, subscriptions — is exactly the set of accounts that need updating, and it writes itself.
4. Update those accounts one at a time as the mail arrives, starting with banking.
5. Tell people. Leave the forwarding on much longer than feels necessary.

Lock the front door

Check your recovery details today. Open your email account’s security settings and look at the recovery phone and recovery address. An old number you gave up, or an address you no longer read, is the most common reason a lockout turns into a permanent loss. This is a two-minute job that quietly prevents the worst afternoon.

Turn on two-step verification. Where you are offered a choice, an authenticator app is stronger than codes by text message, because a phone number can be moved to someone else’s phone. Text codes are still far better than nothing — if the app feels like a step too far today, take the text codes and move on.

Save the recovery codes. When you switch on two-step, you are offered a list of one-time backup codes. Print them and put them where you keep your passport. They are what gets you back in when the phone is lost or dead.

The twenty-minute check, four times a year

Put it in the calendar on the same days you do something else seasonal. It is short, it is boring, and it is the whole maintenance programme.

This guide is general advice, not a recommendation for any particular product or service. Settings and menu names differ between versions and change over time — if something here does not match what is in front of you, the idea still holds even when the wording has moved.