Remember...

Hardware eventually fails, software eventually works.

"Backup" implies a second copy.  What happened to the primary copy?

Every storage device is guaranteed to eventually fail

Every storage device is guaranteed to eventually fail.

That's why you NEED backup. These days with many digital photo family memories, entire priceless family photo collections are at risk if you DO NOT have a backup!

Pay attention -- every storage device is guaranteed to eventually fail. Ask yourself: How would I feel if my entire collection of digital files on this drive were suddenly gone?

If that makes you panic, then get yourself a backup in place immediately.

We cover some simple recommendations for backup here in the March Running Extra:
mrhmag.com/magazine/running-extra/2019-03/publishers-welcome

Ignore this at your own peril ...

Multiple back ups

One copy on your computer, one copy on an external hard drive and another copy on DVD or thumb drive.

Saying in IT

There's a saying in IT ... "a file doesn't exist unless its stored in three places" ... and ONE of those places needs to be offsite.

Flood, fire, windstorm, earthquake can all turn your house to little bitty pieces, including your data storage.

Multiple backups using several media may be a good precaution

I've got somewhat fewer than many thousands of photos and files, so I've used a series of various media to back up the stuff I don't want to lose.

DVDs that I've burned of the most precious stuff, stored at a relative who lives a couple hundred miles away.

USB flash drives, same situation.  Shared those photos (and drives) with other relatives too.

Other copies of those DVDs and USB flash drives in a different room.

Two secondary external HD, one usually disconnected from my primary computer, the other mirroring those several folders full of important stuff that is on the internal HD.

With one Terabyte drives usually available for below $100, it would seem to make sense to pick up a spare drive every other year and re-copy all of those files to it, just to avoid what could be having to spend much more on a recovery service for that lone backup.  And for smaller quantities of files, USB flash drives can be had fairly cheap when they go on sale as stocking stuffers this time of year.

Good luck.

Janet N.

Replace backup media every 10 years

It's like insurance

Having multiple copies of files is like an insurance policy. It's too late to get a policy after the accident and its too late to make copies after the drive fails. In my other life I'm an IT Manager for a large state school and fully endorse everything that has been said here (except maybe the thumb drive or DVD comments.)  I had colleague who had his laptop stolen. No problem, his wedding photos were backed up on an external drive. Unfortunately the external drive was on the desk next to the laptop and got stolen as well.

Always have three copies and always have one in a different location.
Memories (and model railways) are too precious not to.

Why not use the cloud? Google

Good luck

I've had a couple hard drives fail, but I never had anything on them worth trying that hard to salvage.

Is it a spinning or solid-state drive?

"Google accounts are free and

and if you store them at a lower resolution( still big enough for most purposes)  there is no limit for google photos. If something happens to your computer you can just log in with another computer and everything is there waiting for you....DaveB 

Be careful with CDs and DVDs

Joe's comments about replacing media is good advice...

Back in the early 2000s, I saved all of my digital camera pictures off to writable CDs. Due to space constraints, they ended up being the only copies I had.  After about 5 years, I started to get "bit rot" and lost a handful of pictures across several CDs.  I quickly got a network storage device and copied all the CDs over.

Back in my early years, I worked for a Lottery Corporation and we had fifteen (15!) tape backup sets for our systems.  We had an "A" and "B" set for each day of the week that alternated from week to week.  Additionally, Friday had a 3rd set so that one set was in the server room, one set was downstairs in a safe, and the last set was offsite.  I first thought that was way overkill.  I now know better!

For my current personal work, I also have a personal Github account where I can backup my various software development and CAD project files (Arduino projects, JMRI profile directories, PC board projects, etc).  Using a version control system has the added benefit of being able to revert back to an earlier version if I ever need to.

But I still don't have a proper backup for my other data files yet, and I need to change that...

Craig

Yeah fresh of of college I

Yeah fresh of of college I worked in IT.  We had a back up for T-F as well as individual back ups for EVERY Monday.  As well as 12 back ups used only on the first day of each month.  So at any moment I could go back 1 to 5 days. 1 to 4 or 5 weeks (depending on how many Monday's in the month) and 1 to 12 months.

All stored off site in a facility that prof against anything but a direct nuclear strike,

on site I had copies of the daily backup and the drives themselves were duplicated constantly.

It used to take 4 or 5 tubs of reals for the daily and weakly  backup and 7 to 8 for the monthly back up.

I think we could easily fit that all on a good USB drive now with room to spare.  And send the whole thing to the cloud for off site backup.

But the day the building caught fire and dropped the power for a week we managed to be up and running at out disaster site within 24 hours.  And back on site 48 hours after we were allowed back into the building and had power restored.  And that was with water from the fire getting into our floors power distribution room from the fire the floor above us.

The time our halon system discharged and the power went into full interrupt.  It took 2 hours after the all clear to replace 1 hard drive that crashed (it was actively writing when the power dropped and its heads crashed) and we were back to full on the Dec system.  The Unix boxes (ran by some other company) took 4 and a half days and almost bankrupted the company...  they did NOT have a good backup system.

At my home office  I have the main drive set up in a raid to duplicate everything and it does a nightly back up to an external drive .  I also do a weekly back up to the cloud and send my client files out to them most days.

For my home system I do something similar minus the raid.

call me paranoid.  

But in over the last 20 years or so I have seen an unexplainable Halon dump.  A building fire that fried all the electric distribution panels in a 6 story building.  A partially flooded first floor that made us shut down the computer center for three days.  A Clogged roof drain that sent the water down the elevator shaft.  The repair man was siting on a wood step stool with his feet touching the water on the first step from the top.  I told him he needed a taller ladder he said that one was 10 feet but the water was 8 in the elevator pit,  My buddies computer store burnt down.  My Electronics salesmen’s house burnt down and my Parents house burnt down.  By one clients office was hit by a power spike that killed everything not protected by surge protection including the teapot the refrigerator and the microwave,  and another client got hacked when there IT provider was hacked and they were down for three days,  And I think I am forgetting something...

So you take whatever chances you like.  Me well I may be paranoid but that doesn’t mean the aren’t out to get me,

-Doug M

NAS

I had a Buffalo NAS with four 3TB drives in a RAID array. Slow, but it worked and I had a spare drive if I needed one. 

Then Microsoft released an update that cut communication to it (apparently the network language it spoke was easily exploited. Fortunately I discovered that before another computer I had was updated - I immediately started copying from the NAS to a couple large USB3 hard drives I had sitting around. 

This also had the nice side effect of uploading it all to my cloud backup solution (Crashplan by Code 42). 

Now if only the machine I built to replace the Buffalo worked... 

I'm kind of behind the times

I'm kind of behind the times as far as the cloud but I did start using something on  Windows known as "one drive". I'm mostly not a paranoid person but I keep like six copies of important files in various places. Being a gamer, computer hobbyist and ham radio operator, I build my PC rigs from component pieces  and I probably have ten different HD's around here lying around not even being used. Not even sure what's on some of them anymore and some may not work. Not too long ago, I came upon an 80MB, that's right MB, HD tucked away in a drawer. I can remember when that was considered big!

I'm using a cloud drive that

I'm using a cloud drive that is synced between 5 PCs. So anything I save on any of these machines gets automatically copied to the cloud and all the others. I've had more than one PC die on me over the years but it does not matter, no data gets lost.

Cloud Storage and local copies

Like Joe mentioned, someone should always have 3 copies of a file. So please don't think that your primary file and just a cloud storage provider is safe. Yes it's offsite, yes it's handy, but no, you have zero control over the files in the cloud. And even a large cloud company can fail or simply shutter a particular service. So if you use a cloud provider, consider having that 3rd and possibly a 4th copy: at least one on a local hard drive, and the 4th one on a hard drive somewhere offsite. That way if the cloud provider fails or you lose access to the cloud account (think: your house burns down with your computer gear and your backup password vault doesn't contain your last changed complex cloud provider password since you changed it after to your last backup), you still have your local offsite copy.

Never mind the ever increasing nastiness of ransomware figuring out how to encrypt and hold hostage your local data, your network attached (NAS) data and your data stored in a cloud provider's service.

You can't be paranoid enough with protecting your valued data.

Verify ability to restore

As long as we're being paranoid here (and remember just 'cause you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you), a backup isn't really any use unless you can actually restore from it.  It's worth doing a little restore exercise for a backup every once in a while just to make sure the backup mechanism is still actually working properly.

The fledgeling IT department of a no-longer-extant company I worked for a couple decades ago learned this the hard way when the night cleaning staff pulled the plug on the build server to plug in the vacuum cleaner and took out the hard drive.  No problem, we had configured it to be backed up by IT.  Except it turns out that whoever ordered the backup tapes for IT got audio rated tapes, not data rated tapes, and nothing on any backup was retrievable.

An amusing tale from a bygone era, but the moral stands - unless you can actually restore from a backup, a backup by itself isn't worth much.