I’ve always kept two copies of important data on my computers, that’s been a habit over many years. This article shows how important keeping three copies is these days. Now I do recall that companies I have worked for many years ago were keeping three copies of the information on their mainframe computers. I thought that was over the top but I guess there was a lot of money tied up in that data, backing it up properly in as ‘failsafe way’ was important.
From the link below:
"I’d always thought I was pretty good at keeping my personal data safe, but I was wrong.
My personal files were backed up onto two HDD external hard drives, and in the space of 24 hours in July, both drives failed."
The BBC News item on the link below is I reckon at least worth a read:
Do you back-up your files and if so how many copies do you have?
A friend who works in IT says if you have not got something stored in 3 places, then it’s not really that important to you. It is so easy to store things for free, that not having back up’s is silly.
I have several clouds that I use. I have a couple of memory sticks & an external HD.
My storage is about the same, various memory sticks, two external hard drives and some CDs plus iCloud. Also these days I receive most of what used to be paperwork in the post, via e-mail, so more to store. Something else I do with anything that is current and important is to also copy that to a laptop, that way hopefully I have all eventualities covered.
I try to keep things in order by date. Images, documents each month. I transferred it to DVD but now I have a Terabyte. It’s vast. I actually have five but the supplier incorrectly supplied the others.
Yes, I do that Minx. Having four Macs, well one of them is an iPhone, I have four lots of free storage on iCloud. The most useful storage I find is using Time Machine, that is a free application with Macs and backs up to anything you choose automatically, I don’t have to do anything at all. I use an external hard drive for that, it backs up only files that have been changed and when full the older files just ‘fall off’ the end. Now no longer working that is enough for me. Working as a graphic designer in the past there was a real need to ensure everything was backed up, that was all income so very important, not so much these days though.
2 Windows 10 Desktop PCs - each OS backed up daily (1 incremental/1 differential) to its own EHD with a month of copies retained - Macrium Reflect
All personal data held on another EHD for each PC - most, including my MP3 collection, held in OneDrive (1TB), and therefore, when updated, instantaneously backed up to the cloud and the alternate PC/EHD - the rest, mostly large video files, are rarely updated but are manually copied to the alternate PC/EHD when required.
Additionally, for each PC, a full Windows system image weekly with daily HDD file backups to EHD.
ETA Also Google Drive (15GB) on both PC/EHDs to interface with my mobile phone.
Multi-generational system and data backups with off-site storage and remote recovery facilities were entirely familiar to a mainframe computer specialist like myself … and I never lost the habit …
IIRC, Grandfather was kept in a fireproof safe in a remote location onsite, Father was kept in a fireproof safe in the building housing the mainframe computer and Son was located either in the racks or on a trolley, ready to be ‘cycled’.
I have a 2tb external HD partitioned into 2 1xtb sections permanently connected to the PC, for storage, a further 4tb drive as a backup for everything and also spreadsheets saved to my OneDrive. Files are auto backed up every night to one of the external partitions and in turn, those partitions incrementally backed up to the 4tb drive.
I back my data up to two NAS drives as well as a variety of USB HDDs. The NAS drives have redundancy built in via RAID Arrays so if one drive fails data is not lost.
NAS = Network Attached Storage
This is one I have it is a few years old now
Its interface looks like this (there is 3.78Tb free)
Wow, there are only experts on board. I have my data on two external HDDs only, nothing stored on the notebook itself nor on the cloud which I could use but do not really trust. Not sure which of my data are really worth saving. Those that are would go on a memory stick I guess. I’ll take this as an opportunity to think about it again.
I don’t seem to be as well-organised as I want to think I am.
I use flash drives, CDs, an external HD and good old fashioned printed hard copy for some things - would not trust the ‘cloud’ as far as I could throw an elephant!
Before I had my notebook repaired once (new keyboard) I had cleaned the hard disc because I suspected they might have a look at its content. On picking up the notebook it turned out he had at least noticed that it was empty and you never know if they wouldn’t have felt tempted to take a closer look if it wasn’t.
