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Backups

canadmos

Cake Tease
May 29, 2011
20,190
19,156
Canaderp
Robocopy to some disks and rotate through them. Once a week or something put one in your truck or take it to a friends.
 

canadmos

Cake Tease
May 29, 2011
20,190
19,156
Canaderp
If bandwidth, security and cost are concerns, then I'd say copying to your own disks is still the best solution. :D

At the very least, you'll know where your data is, how it is protected and how to retrieve it.
 

StiHacka

Compensating for something
Jan 4, 2013
21,560
12,504
In hell. Welcome!
1. make a microfiche of your precious documents
2. attach to a pigeon
3. send pigeon on a round trip around the globe
4. profit?
 

syadasti

i heart mac
Apr 15, 2002
12,690
290
VT
If bandwidth, security and cost are concerns, then I'd say copying to your own disks is still the best solution. :D

At the very least, you'll know where your data is, how it is protected and how to retrieve it.
Crashplan lets you do that from site to site on your own (or a friend's) hardware for free, you don't have to pay for their cloud storage.
 

binary visions

The voice of reason
Jun 13, 2002
22,092
1,132
NC
A few things I've decided about backups:

- If it's not off-site, it's not backed up. I was once burglarized. They took my computer. Yay, backups! Wait, no, they took my external hard drives, too.

- If it's not automated (and by automated, I mean ZERO human interaction, not, "my backup is automated but I need to move my disks once a week"), it's not reliable. It is inevitable that the day you get a failure is the day you're at the tail end of your manual rotation cycle and you just happened to lose some photo that you really liked.

- If the off-site backup medium isn't online (that is, attached to a live computer where failures will be detected), you need to have two copies. Also inevitable, that you will need your backup, and you will plug the drive in, and you will hear click...click...click.

If you're an average user, a copy on your computer and a copy with a verified backup service like Crashplan/Backblaze is enough.

If you have important data, a copy on your computer, a copy on a second disk/external drive, and a verified backup service is enough. This is what I do. I pretty much assume that the chances of two drives failing simultaneously AND Crashplan's datacenter going up in smoke at the same time is slim.

For the paranoid, you can scale further out - one on your computer, a copy on a second disk, an offline/offsite backup, even two cloud providers.

Pay the $5/month for Crashplan's unlimited service. It's easy, it's cheap, it's automatic, it's got great file versioning capabilities, and your data will go into a real datacenter, not your buddy's laptop that he regularly perches his beers on. If security is a concern, you can protect your data with an encryption key, but protect that key with your life because your data will be irretrievable if you lose it.
 
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