[cozy]

Just reading these and just over a year ago it was 214 dollars for a 160gb external, you could get two seperate tbs for that now... kinda like being in a time machine...

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In making sure nothing goes wrong in the computer industry there is this idea of redundancy N+1 (Necessary plus 1). Now this is only for people who are paranoid of loosing there data. It is considered necessary to have at least one backup of your data. Plus one that would be a backup of backup this ideally would be stored offsite (online web/Safe Deposit box etc...). In the case of the unfortunate.

But you have to know where to draw the line in redundancy due to you can go overboard.

I would say the dream backup plan is 6 daily, 4 weekly 1 monthly 1 yearly rotated. That is a lot of redundancy.

The way I do things at home is I never store data on the actual system. Everything is stored on the server. It makes backup easier. Then I backup the server periodically.

And where do you keep the server? and the backups from the server? If they are in the home and you have a fire, it is a mute point....you are still out of luck.
There doesn't seem to be any really good choice.

[123Runner]

In making sure nothing goes wrong in the computer industry there is this idea of redundancy N+1 (Necessary plus 1). Now this is only for people who are paranoid of loosing there data. It is considered necessary to have at least one backup of your data. Plus one that would be a backup of backup this ideally would be stored offsite (online web/Safe Deposit box etc...). In the case of the unfortunate.

But you have to know where to draw the line in redundancy due to you can go overboard.

I would say the dream backup plan is 6 daily, 4 weekly 1 monthly 1 yearly rotated. That is a lot of redundancy.

The way I do things at home is I never store data on the actual system. Everything is stored on the server. It makes backup easier. Then I backup the server periodically.

And where do you keep the server? and the backups from the server? If they are in the home and you have a fire, it is a mute point....you are still out of luck.
There doesn't seem to be any really good choice.

[Troy]

Everything should be on the local machines which backup daily to the server. From there implement the ideal solution Tuxmaster mentioned above.

I support a few businesses who do things this way with a tape drive.

[dsenette]

what runner was talking about is that it doesn't really matter how often, or where you back your data up to. if all of your backups are in the same physical location as your system (i.e in your house), then you've got a single point of failure. the house burns down and you lose everything.

the only real way to be sure you don't lose anything is to do local backups with offsite archiving of the media, or to just do your backups offsite directly. preferably to multiple locations just in case they blow up too

[Troy]

As a very simple backup, if I have an important document I need to backup, I just email it to myself as an attachment at my Gmail account. It's free and has heaps of storage.

So for things like receipts or excel worksheets and stuff, just email it to yourself. If for any reason your main backup doesn't want to restore you can easily login and retrieve the attachments.