A general concern with any sort of outsourcing is how much and how long can you depend on the provider to be there? Lots of companies go from all is good to completely gone in the blink of an eye. What happens to your data (and your recovery plans) then?

Some specific concerns for outsourcing data storage: Is the server farm you are backing up to (some where in the land of tubes) actually redundant? Does the company have a mirroring / internal offsite backup approach? How often do they test their recovery process from full or incremental backups?

I don't have the fastest network connection in the world so, I have stuck with copies on hard drives for critical data (not really all that much space compared to all the stuff filling my hard drives) and some reasonable protection of the backups (one onsite in "hardened storage" - a fire safe, and one at work a mile or so away). That covers the likely scenarios I need to worry about while having a laptop covers most of the rest of my concerns.

Good luck finding what works for you.

- Eric

Well, I finally got around to watching a film I recorded onto my PC called AI, after looking at the Digital TV card folder (from a old Hauppauge DEC 2000). Then I noticed the date it was recorded, 30th December 2004.

Is there really any point of having vast libraries of video and photos etc if you never really get around to watching them. I would just put all your critical data on a enterprise USB flash drive. Does you NAS enclosure have a USB port to backup to a portable drive?

Recordable DVD also is worthwhile as even many BluRay and DVD players will also display photos, music etc

WD Velociraptor HDD drives have MTBFs of around 1.4 million hours i.e. around 4-5 times that of other HDD drives and many SSDs will have MTBF of 1 million hours.

As far as movies go, I would agree except that the kids have videos that they watch over and over. And they are MURDER on DVD's. They also have a huge pile of VHS - I'm going to capture the ones they actually watch as they watch them. Perhaps most people don't have this issue, but I have seven (7) kids. By the time something has been handed down and outgrown by your 2.5 children, mine aren't even half way through with it.

Further, we don't have cable and or decent broadcast TV reception. Everything we watch is either on media or streaming from Netflix, PJTV, EWTN, Youtube etc. The next project is add another computer that will be our new "TV". For the life of me I can't figure out if I should get the biggest monitor I can afford or buy a "real" tv to use as a monitor.

You can either encrypt before backup or (with Carbonite) manage your encryption key yourself. If you manage your own encryption key, they cannot recover it or your files if it should become lost.

For myself, I encrypt a few critical files.



Truecrypt is outstanding.



I would worry more about my LogMeIn credentials being compromised than Carbonite getting hacked.

I worry about that too. I keep a close watch of my firewall's logs and I change the password often and use some really long pass phrases. Over the past 10 years I haven't had any problems, knock on wood.

Have in mind though, that many free online storage services do not allow any encrypted content.

I'm also using a RAID-1 NAS for the important documents storage, which is duplicated to other 2 external drives periodically. I have it sitting openly on the table, so I can grab it and take out in an emergency.

Well, I now have a pair of WD 2TB "Green" drives set up as RAID 1. I chose the "green" version because they ought to run cooler and therefore more reliably, and speed is not of the essence.

I'll let you know when I run out of storage. Thanks for the advice, everyone.

One last comment - I have the DNS-323. If the NAS itself did fail, you should be able to mount either drive in a Linux host as they're formated for ext2 (or ext3, depending on which firmware you're using).

If a Linux is not available, you could consider using a Bootable LiveCD or Live USB Key running Fedora, Ubuntu, or whatever else you're comfortable with.

Actually, if you want the best reliability, there are two version of each drive. The consumer version and the enterprise version. The enterprise version of green is supposed to be more reliable and better for RAID use than the consumer version of green.

Otherwise, consumer grade Blue, Green, and Black, are supposed to be equal in their reliability. The difference between them are things like power consumption, speed, cache, and, of course, price.

Hmmm. I also have the DNS-323 and had not thought of that. I was thinking I would be able to plug one of the drives into my SATA to USB adapter, run power to it, and plug it into my Windows machine. I guess that won't work.