“Rule number one: Never store all of your eggs in one basket.”
My very first thought when reading this, from personal experience.
I used to have a collection of hard drives with gobs of information stored on them. Some financially related and thus quite confidential. I bought a new hard drive that would hold all, with intentions of backing that new hard drive up.
The complete transfer was made to the new single hard drive, the old ones were destroyed, then the new one failed. Two decades worth of data lost. The warranty was worthless unless I wanted some recovery tech to see my confidential goodies.
Never, ever again will all the eggs be in one basket.
Been there, done that, and have the mug and T-shirt to prove it. ;-D I also wised up about media in general. Eight inch floppy gave way to five inch, which gave way to 3-1/2 inch. Those morph into CD, and then DVDs, and so on. I've copied a lot of files, in duplicate to be sure.
I've been screwed too many times.
Yes, if it’s important data, it needs to be backed up to at least three different places, with at least one backup stored off-site.
I have all my documents backed up to:
1. A server which backs up to an external 8TB drive
2. 2 separate NAS HD’s of 4TB and 8TB
3. 2 separate portable HD’s
4. 4 separate thumb drives of 256 GB each
My problem is I have so many backups it’s hard to tell which is the most recent. I’ve never lost a single data file, but oddly, have never had to recover any files either. Had to re-install Windows multiple times, and lost a lot of programs, but never lost any data. One good thing about re-installing Windows is you never miss the clunker programs and I don’t re-install them, so each subsequent Windows install gets cleaner.
Yup. Backups matter. I recommend a backup program based on rsync. Do a full backup daily. On at least a quarterly basis rotate that drive out for a spare, then put the original one back. My current backup drive has 37 backups going as far back as 2016.
20161231-030001-690 20171231-030002-454 20181231-030001-279 20191231-030001-946 20201227-135700-250 20210131-030001-547 20210228-030001-431 20210331-030001-183 20210430-030001-831 20210531-030001-819 20210630-030001-816 20210731-030001-550 20210831-030002-995 20210930-030001-473 20211031-030001-289 20211130-030001-433 20211231-030001-721 20220131-030002-366 20220228-030001-825 20220331-030001-420 20220430-030001-312 20220531-030001-519 20220630-030001-815 20220731-030001-104 20220831-030001-840 20220930-030001-144 20221031-030001-434 20221106-030001-162 20221113-030001-489 20221120-030001-602 20221121-030001-421 20221122-030002-899 20221123-030001-831 20221124-030001-447 20221125-030001-161 20221126-030001-358
Thanks for reminding me. Tonight would be a good evening to do my quarterly backup.