Backups of important files.

letiss7

I recently purchased a 2TB Western Digital Cloud device and copied a lot of photos and videos from my PC to it.
Currently my PC / WD drive act as backups of each other.
However I am thinking of replacing my PC and that lead me to seek an answer to question I've had in the back of my mind for a long time.
How do people backup huge amounts of important files?
In my case important is the photos/videos of my family through the years.


I don't mind paying something to have a secure, online, offsite backup service as offered by some companies online.
I can avoid an ongoing cost by buying another device but the issue I see with that is in case of fire, theft or accidental damage at my home I could potentially lose the original and backups.
Am I over thinking this or do others consider this a 'real' issue and have taken steps to protect their value files?

mgfvvc

letiss7 wrote: »

How do people backup huge amounts of important files?
In my case important is the photos/videos of my family through the years.

Our primary backup is to a D-Link RAID level 1 NAS (that's a box on the network containing 2 mirrored disks), so we have 3 copies in the house.

letiss7 wrote: »

I don't mind paying something to have a secure, online, offsite backup service as offered by some companies online.
I can avoid an ongoing cost by buying another device but the issue I see with that is in case of fire, theft or accidental damage at my home I could potentially lose the original and backups.
Am I over thinking this or do others consider this a 'real' issue and have taken steps to protect their value files?

Although very low probability (I hope) this is a real risk. Our secondary backup is to a Spideroak account. This is encrypted and Spideroak claim not to keep a copy of the key. This means it should secure against network eavesdropping, hackers and their staff, but also, if you lose the details needed to access it, then they won't be able to recover it for you.

Finally we occasionally leave Blu-Ray disks with our backups on with family in other pars of the world. The likelihood of finding these if we need them is low and they are usually significantly out of date.

esuhl

I just back up to internal and external drives. I doubt a burglar would find and take all of the drives (and the PC is physically too heavy for one person to lift, anyway). So the only risk is if the house burns down. And that's a risk I'm willing to take.

googler

Put another 2Tb drive with the same copies in a fireproof box (£30 from DIY sheds or office supply store) in attic or garage. Put this box in an unassuming cardboard box, something a burglar would be unlikely to give a second glance.

Keep another HDD at your place of work

Consider DVDs or BRs stashed at friend or relatives' houses. Consider HDDs at same places.

Keep control of your data. Your online data is only as safe as the company which holds it, and you just need to look at the recent history of, say, BHS, RBS, and others to see how safe companies are.

DigForVictory

Me, I got a 2TB portable drive & used it to migrate all we valued from PCs #1, #2, & #3 (sheesh we stored some dusty rubbish) onto PC#4, then shuffled stuff from the Block to son's new PC. So much of what is seriously dear to me is on 2 PCs in the house & mirrored on the block & I plan to duplicate the block onto a sibling device & leave that with the grandparents.
It'll date, but I'll still be able to get at the good old days. Blackmail the offspring when the carehome beckons.
Reassure soon-to-be-in-laws that X is Normal for so-&-so & here's photo evidence to prove it. Maybe even give grandchildren a howling good laugh - ye gods dad wore That?!

Mirno

What disasters are you trying to mitigate?
If your backup is "live" (i.e. another machine connected to yours via a network), then a software issue that deletes/encrypts files will likely do the same to it.

If the backup is on the same site as your main machine, then it is vulnerable to theft or accidental damage.

If you only have the one instance of a backup (mirror your hard disk every week say), you may find it has already been deleted before you noticed it was gone.

Obviously, the costs you're willing to incur for your piece of mind are relative to the value of the things you're backing up (and how quickly you may want them back). Paying for a fire-proof safe is probably not worthwhile...
In terms of backing up for the casual home user, it takes a lot to beat dropping a DVD off to your parents/brother/sister every once in a while.
Writeable DVDs are cheap, relatively reliable, and portable. You can password protect the backup if you want to too.

letiss7

Thank you all for your replies, certainly makes me feel better that I'm not the only one that has thought about storing backups away from home.
I will look at the various options that you all have mentioned and see what works best for my situation.

psychic_teabag

Mirno wrote: »

In terms of backing up for the casual home user, it takes a lot to beat dropping a DVD off to your parents/brother/sister every once in a while.
Writeable DVDs are cheap, relatively reliable, and portable. You can password protect the backup if you want to too.

While it wasn't anything important, I was rather dissapointed to find that several DVDs I'd written proved to be unreadable after only a few months. Repeated re-reading did eventually get most of the files back, but it was very time-consuming. I think they were branded, and write-once rather than R/W. Have now given up on using DVD and use hard disks now. (I think flash sticks are also prone to losing data.)

Don't know if DVD-R is better than DVD+R, or blu-ray is better than DVD.

S0litaire

Just adding in my +1 for spideoak

its very Secure ( yes it's a bit slow but it's doing a lot of encryption on your end before sending it to the cloud)

esuhl

psychic_teabag wrote: »

While it wasn't anything important, I was rather dissapointed to find that several DVDs I'd written proved to be unreadable after only a few months...

Writeable CD/DVDs degrade relatively quickly, although they should be fine for several years. Hard disks are supposed to be more reliable.

psychic_teabag wrote: »

Don't know if DVD-R is better than DVD+R...

DVD+R is better. But I don't know how much of a difference it makes.

[T]he DVD+R style Address In Pregroove (ADIP) system of tracking and speed control is less susceptible to interference and error, which makes the ADIP system more accurate at higher speeds than the Land Pre Pit (LPP) system used by DVD-R. In addition, DVD+R(W) has a more robust error management system than DVD-R(W), allowing for more accurate burning to media, independent of the quality of the media. The practical upshot is that a DVD+R writer is able to locate data on the disc to byte accuracy whereas DVD-R is incapable of such precision.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD%2BR