Every other page in this set is about walls. This one is about the day a wall fails — on any system, Windows or Linux — and why a versioned, offline backup turns that day into a story instead of a loss.
Ask a security professional what actually defeats ransomware and you will hear one word before all others: backup. Not an antivirus, not an operating system — a backup, kept the right way. Ransomware's whole business is holding the only copy of your data hostage. The moment a second, clean, unreachable copy exists, the business collapses: you wipe, restore, and lose an afternoon instead of your archive. Zorin OS gives you a head start with its architecture, but this page is the universal rule — and it has two details people constantly get wrong: versioned and offline.
The shape of a backup ransomware cannot defeat — several versions of your files, with at least one copy the PC cannot reach.
A simple mirror copy feels like a backup and fails like one. If your files are encrypted on Monday and your mirror syncs on Tuesday, the mirror faithfully copies the encrypted versions over the good ones — now both copies are locked. A versioned backup keeps history: Monday's files, last Friday's, last month's, each preserved separately. When disaster is discovered, you roll back to the last version from before it happened. This is why proper backup tools exist, and why dragging folders onto a drive by hand, however sincere, is only half a backup.
Anything your PC can reach while running, ransomware running on that PC can also reach. A permanently connected backup drive, a mounted network share, a syncing cloud folder — all visible, all encryptable. The defence is a copy that is disconnected when not backing up: an external drive you plug in, back up to, and remove. Cloud backup with version history earns its place too, because retrieving old versions happens through the provider's controls, not through your possibly-compromised PC. Offline is not old-fashioned. Offline is the entire point.
Professionals compress the whole idea into 3-2-1: at least 3 copies of what matters, on 2 different kinds of storage, with 1 copy kept apart — offline or off-site. For a home Zorin user this is practical, not corporate: your working files on the PC are copy one; a versioned backup on an external drive is copy two; that same drive stored away from the PC between backups — or a cloud copy with version history — is copy three. Photographs and documents are usually small enough that this costs one modest drive and ten minutes a week.
Zorin and its Ubuntu base give you both halves. Timeshift takes snapshots of the operating system itself, so a bad update or broken setting can be rolled back to a working day — install it from the Software store and let it snapshot automatically. For your actual files, the built-in Backups tool (Déjà Dup) or Pika Backup from the Software store will write versioned backups to an external drive on a schedule. Use both tools for their own jobs: Timeshift will not save your documents, and a file backup will not resurrect a broken system. Together they cover the whole machine.
An untested backup is a hope, not a backup. Once, soon after setting yours up, do a trial: pick a folder, restore last week's version of it to a temporary place, and open the files. Five minutes proves the whole chain — the drive works, the versions exist, the tool can read them, and you know the steps before the day you need them under stress. Repeat the test once or twice a year. Every sad backup story ever told includes the sentence 'we had backups, but...' — the test is how you make sure that sentence is never yours.
Watch the video for the protection test — and then go plug in a drive. This page is the one that will actually save your files someday.
▶️ Watch Full VideoIt is a copy, not a backup. Anything that damages the PC — encryption, theft, a failed drive — takes both copies together. A backup must live on separate storage, and at least one copy should be disconnected or off-site with older versions preserved, so a bad day cannot reach back and spoil it too.
Back up as often as you create things you would hate to lose — weekly suits most home users, daily for work files. Automate it so it happens without willpower: Timeshift snapshots for the system and a scheduled file backup to an external drive. Then remember the offline rule — an always-connected drive is only half protected.
Partly. Cloud storage keeps a copy away from your home, which covers theft and fire. But a syncing folder can also sync encrypted files upward. It counts as a strong copy when the service keeps file version history you can roll back — check that the version feature exists and know how to use it before you rely on it.