Good reminder, thanks.

I learned the lesson the painful, expensive way (was desperate to have photos retrieved from the old hard drive).

Now have a 500gig Winbook and back up regularly. Have been backing up favorite pics on CDs to send to my sister 3000 miles away.

You might be surprised how little of those reams of data really matter.

Yes back up tapes, disks and drives are all good, but hard copy still has uses.

After data loss you are forced to learn

For our servers we use RAID (mirroring) and then off-server back-up onto another server that ALSO has RAID (mirroring).

I added mirroring to the backup server after one of the drives failed in that server... I thought if for some ODD reason during the repair/re-install on that box if something went down on the other I`d be screwed.

I also tend to randomly back-up locally on DVDs too

I back everything worth keeping to optical media.

Anything I might really, really NEED, backed up to paper.

Since I am on Win platform I use built in NT Backup for incremental backup to external HDD. But the .bkf file can get corrupted so I also "mirror" the same data without the history to the external HDD using open source sw called PathSync. All this is done manualy every evening.
Once a two weeks I save the image of the system partition to the external HDD (using Seagate utility DiskWizard - free if you have Seagate HDD) and take certain important data (but not personal), compress and encrypt them with 7-zip (open source) and upload them to the on-line storage.
Not perfect backup plan but better than nothing. I am also researching the DVD-RAM for backup since it should behave almost like HDD.


Is it your only backup? I wouldn´t trust optical media too much especially for long term archiving.

I run an ubuntu server in the basement and have a disk shared from there that our (wife and I) macbooks use to back up via time machine over the wireless network.
http://www.kremalicious.com/2008/06/ubuntu-as-mac-file-server-and-time-machine-volume/
We used to use usb hard drives but were never consistent; with the network backups its seamless. Next week I am going to replace the single disk with a mirrored array just to be extra safe.

In addition to on-site backups (RAID, tapes, external hard drives, etc.) I have been configuring off-site backups my clients. (Barracuda, Carbonite, etc.).

If the building/home burns, is blown away by a hurricane, or the equipment is stolen, you might be in trouble. On-line backup services solve this problem.

Carbonite is a good home solution, Barracuda is good for business.


The on-line backup services may not appeal to the security paranoid crowd, but I go over it. Barracuda is HIPAA compliant.

Online backup services do not appeal to me only because these companies come and go all the time. Yes there are some better reputed companies such as Barracuda and Mozy but in general bigger web companies have failed and I sleep better knowing that my personal or company information is not saved on one of these failed companies servers. This is regardless of HIPPA or PCI-DSS compliance...

The come and go is scary, but even then unless you pay a lot of $ there is no gaurentee or SLA. Years ago a paid for the upgraded hotmail account and was backing up all my mail there until one day it was all gone with a note from the admins stating there was an issue.
Also if your backing up data online consider restore time. Sending the only changed file or two up there isn't that big of a deal but what if your computer is destroyed and you then have to restore, how long is it going to take to pull all that data back? It would take days just to get my pictures.
I've been tempted to set up another server at my parnets house. I have small low power 500MHz fanless via board that runs headless for my backup server, I could easily set up one there and have it pull data down from my home. My parents are in a dial up only area unless you want satalite so having a pull type system where my server at their house dials into the internet then connects to me and pulls data back could work. I keep my offiste backups there on dvd already

This is a good point, but you guys are missing the bigger point. This is Plan B or Plan C. I am not suggesting this as an complete alternative to a local backup. This is the fail safe if a real catastrophe happens. Waiting a day or two for a full restore would definitely beat loosing everything.

Buildings burn, equipment gets stolen and hard drives fail. If you are in the business long enough, you will come across these situations and more. Nothing suck more than telling someone that they have lost everything, or their only potential recovery option is a "clean room recovery service" for $2,500 per hard drive (e.g http://www.drivesavers.com )

Regarding security, data is double encrypted before it is even transmitted. While it is possible, given enough time and resources, to decrypt your data and we are talking about a concerted NSA effort here, it is a safe bet that your data simply isn't worth the time for someone to try to steal.

For $50 a year, for unlimited storage, Carbonite is tough to beat. You can't even buy a decent external hard drive for this amount.

Granted, companies do fail. It would be worth a moment or two of your time every once in a while to test a restore of your files. I would say that local backup equipment fails far more often and has to be closely monitored.

Even if the on-line storage company goes belly up, I'm not worried. My data has little value to anyone but me. But for to me, it is priceless.

Also, if you have something truly sensitive, then you could exclude it from the on-line backup.