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The original was posted on /r/datahoarder by /u/–Arete on 2024-03-31 13:11:08.

In honor of World Backup Day today (March 31st) I decided to share a training scenario I use every year to make sure my backups are solid. It’s a worst-case scenario, but it helps to put things into perspective.

Training scenario: Ransomware

1. You come back from vacation and access your computer only to realize you have a ransom virus that has managed to encrypt all your data.
2. You have local backups and redundancy, but these files are also encrypted since they were connected to the computer at the time of infection.
3. You check your offline backup on an external disk, but this backup is outdated since you haven’t had time to make backups.
4. You check your cloud backup, but the cloud backup has been overwritten with corrupted/encrypted files.
5. You check the file history (retention) of the cloud backup. But even these files are encrypted because you were on vacation and didn’t realize your computer was infected until you came back a month later.

What have you learned?

I would love to hear about other training scenarios or if this one could be better.