While not a particularly sexy survival topic, we've all got data that is our responsibility to protect, from important business files to family photos and home videos. I searched the site and couldn't really find a prior discussion, so I thought I'd start one since I've been thinking about it this last week.
I've heard that a good rule of thumb is to not consider your files sufficiently backed up until they exist in at least three separate forms, with at least one located off site from your computer. That's the tough part. I guess a decade ago it wasn't that hard to load stuff on CD-ROM or DVD discs and mail them to grandma's house, but multimedia files are so large that you'd have to send it to her on a couple-terabyte hard drive now.
Cloud storage sounded promising as an offsite backup mode, but downloading large files is tedious on a home broadband connection and uploading them in the first place is even worse. It's one thing to store Office documents online at Google Drive, but that doesn't work well for those times when you need to move large media files, like all your family photos, in bulk. Plus, what if you don't have an internet connection and you really need you're files?
So, to satisfy the offsite portion of a good backup strategy, without waiting around for the internet, does that mean we're stuck packing a hard drive to and from separate locations, or sticking them in a good fire safe? The company ioSafe makes several fire and waterproof external drive and NAS units, and they apparently actually survive 30 minutes of house fire and 3 days of submersion in salt water. I thought it was gimmicky, but there's enough people doing
torture tests on Youtube that I'm thinking it is actually the real deal. The problem, though, is they are expensive, like 3-4 times the cost of their pedestrian counterparts.
The other issue that I always worry about is the uncertainty over hard drive failure. A brand new drive could fail within three weeks, or it could last 8 years, but once you get to about 5 years you pretty much know you can't really trust much to it, anymore. The way around this is having multiple backup drives, or expensive/complicated RAID systems with one or two disk redundancy built in. But if you read much about those systems, you'll hear the line about how you need to back them up, too, because there might be an error in rebuilding the array after swapping drives. At some point you just have to say my one backup of my computer, plus a backup of the backup, and maybe whatever I've managed to upload to the cloud, and that's it. Otherwise you'll just go insane.
What are the rest of you doing?
