Not so much as you might think at first. I wasn't clear about ssomething: the deletion/replacement of changed files occurs only when the backup program runs, and it is not configured to run automatically. It runs when I have decided that it has been long enough that I ought to another backup, and hopefully I would notice that my files were encrypted and inaccessible before I ran the backup. There's a pretty good chance that I couldn't even run the backup program if I tried under those circumstances.

Not so much. I have two configurations defined in the backup program, one for the "regular" backups and one for the "off premises" backups. Choose one or the other and click on "Run".

I probably back up about every ten days to two weeks, and the off-premises backups maybe every couple of months. That one is a little more complicated in that I have to exchange the drives in the external docks with the off-premises drives.

My data doesn't change that often, and the data that gets added the most often comes from email which is on Google's server, and eBooks which can be reloaded from Amazon.

I feel reasonably safe.

tanstaafl.