With ever expanding storage, it's hard to fathom why people keep going on about backups until your own hard disk dies and you lose all of your files. Take it from someone to whom this has happened a few times, it's not fun to go through. That is why you need to backup your files periodically, once every few months is optimal. Are there any other ways of doing this? Read on to find out more.
Over the years, I've had a few laptop hard drives fail me, as well as a few hard drives inside my desktop computer. Remember that if one of hard disks fails, there's a good chance that it's still under warranty. Typically, hard drive manufacturers have warranties that can last up to three years. This is one of the reasons why I only use Western Digital hard drives. They have stellar customer service, and I've rarely had trouble with their hard drives. When I did, they were prompt to send me a replacement, after I had sent them the failed drive.
Unless you're willing to spend money to get data out of a failed hard drive, it's best to learn from the experience and move on. I've looked at a few options, but they can get costly.
1. NAS With RAID
One of the easiest ways of no longer worrying about backups is to set up an external hard drive with RAID. RAID means that two or more hard drives are setup together so that if one of them fails, you lose no data. The benefit of a NAS, Network Attached Storage, is that this HD is plugged onto your home network. This means that your whole family can archive and store their data onto it. This is very convenient over a WiFi network.
2. External HDs With RAID
A step below the NAS with RAID, an external enclosure with multiple hard drives usually comes with a RAID controller, allowing you to setup a secure data archiving solution. If you'd like to know what products that you can buy to create these two types of setups, you should check out Drobo with the DroboShare addition. This is a NAS with RAID. Alternatively, if you don't use the DroboShare add-on, then you'd be looking at an external enclosure with RAID.
3. Other Computers
It's good not to keep all of your eggs in one basket. With that in mind, I put most of my important files on my desktop and on my laptop. This means that if one of them fails, the other one serves as a backup.
4. DVDs
As painful as it is, it's convenient to burn media, like movies and TV shows, onto DVDs to archive them. It's annoying, but it does get the job done. I find that once you get started, it's hard to stop.
5. The Cloud
While there are quite a few different options available, for now it still doesn't make sense to archive a lot of data to the cloud, unless we're talking about photos or email. Gmail currently allows you to store up to 7GB of emails and attachments. Picasa, Flickr and Zooomr allow plenty of online storage for photos. I upload all of my photos to my Zooomr account. I've got over 17,000 archived to this date.
[photos via Digital Earth, Wikipedia, Holbrook, and Drobo]
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Every few months!? Good lord, if I lost even a month's worth of work and other data it would cost me dearly.
If it's important, back it up daily... in at least 2 locations. One location should be local- an external drive, NAS, whatever. The second should be off-site. Mozy, Carbonite, etc are a good way to go because they require you to do nothing, they simply back up in the background. Otherwise, get yourself another external drive, back up to that weekly, and take it off site. I have a drive I leave at work, bring home one night a week to back up to, take back to work just in case of theft, fire, water damage, whatever at my home. This also means I always have all my music with me at work (and everything else is encrypted to keep nosy coworkers out).
Agree with charmac. Increasingly a lot of our day to day errands, correspondence, bills and memories are digital. Losing a months worth would be MORE than inconvenient to say the least.
I backup using Time Machine and have an external that I use to make a clone of my computer using Super Duper. I take the external to work just like charmac.
With the prices of hard drives becoming so affordable, backing up shouldn't be just an option. It's become a necessity.
I once lost a big chunk of my music(thank god for software that can pull music off of an iPod), all of my photos and a lot of other important files because I neglected to have a proper back up. Never again.
But yeah, ever few months seems too long to me as well. I would say to back up once a month at the least (weekly would be better). I have an external HD with a bootable back up that I used to updated everynight, but now I just update it once or twice a week. I also use Dropbox for files that I want to share/sync with other systems and I use Mozy to do offsite back ups incase of a fire or something like that.
Backing up only every few months is insane! I have myself, my parents, and my in-laws all backing up to each others computers using crashplan which is free for home use.
Yes, backups are prone to failure. But the original repository constitutes a copy as well. In other words, two copies of your data is probably excessive. The likelihood of both copies failing simultaneously is pretty slim. Still, you should backup your data in whatever fashion makes you the most comfortable.
@Paladin, both copies failing at the same time due to hard drive failure is unlikely, however, it's always best to keep another copy off-site and since a lot of my work and client files would be lost if there was a fire or theft, a third, off-site, copy is necessary.
"As painful as it is, it's convenient to burn media, like movies and TV shows, onto DVDs to archive them. It's annoying, but it does get the job done."
Isn't this advice contrary to all the other posts on unplgged telling me that my physical media collection is passé?