Lifehacker wrote:

There's No Excuse for Not Backing Up Your Computer. Do It Now.

At least once a month, some friend or family member asks me how to recover data from a failed hard drive. I help them as best I can, but in my head, my answer is always the same: "go back in time and back up your computer like you know you should've."

When your computer's hard drive fails, it can be gut-wrenching. At best, maybe you lost a really important presentation you were working on. At worst, maybe you've lost every photo of your kid's childhood. Sometimes, you can recover that data yourself—but often, it's gone forever (unless you want to pay a lot of money to get it back). Every hard drive fails one day. Backup service Backblaze says 50% fail after only four years. Save yourself the trouble and start backing up your computer now.

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http://lifehacker.com/the...1547987206

I have a Time Machine on my machine at home and even paid for my own on my work computer. Those have saved my bacon more than once.

I have stuff on various backup disks. My nightmare scenario is that the computer's drive will fail and then I'll go to restore it, and the backup drive will fail or be "unreadable" for some unexplained reason.

My main computer has 3 hard drives in it so a lot of my important stuff is duplicated on more than one of those drives, and I've also got a couple of external drives that have enough space to store most everything that would be a huge loss if the computer went down, so I think (hope?) I'm covered, although it would be a chore to figure out what is where.

Forsyth Mike wrote:

My nightmare scenario is that the computer's drive will fail and then I'll go to restore it, and the backup drive will fail or be "unreadable" for some unexplained reason.

I've had that happen. It sucks. iOmega was popular with their Zip Drive and Jaz Drive products back in the 90's. The original MilesCity.com site (from 1998) was undoubtedly backed up/archived on one of them. The bulk of those discs failed long ago. Also, many of the early CD-R and DVD-R discs I used in the past for backups have now failed.

So it's a constant battle to keep backing up / copying everything to newer and newer technologies.

At this point, with Google offering 1TB of cloud storage for $9.99 a month, I may just take them up on it.

I was looking through data in a storage area several years ago on a property we acquired. Outside the door, I found a bucket that was full of Colorado back-up tapes frozen in a block of ice. They were marked as backups of engineering computers from the previous operator which was just what I was looking for. I thawed them out and dried them up as we had an old computer with a Colorado drive and Windows 95. When I stuck the previously drenched and frozen tapes in, the damn things actually ran. The only problem we couldn't overcome was the tapes were all 250MB and the computer HD wasn't big enough to down load the data (which was all or nothing.) That and the fact the last drivers Colorado wrote were for Windows 2000ME and Vista didn't like them. Gave them to some data recovery guys and they couldn't build an old junk interface either. Sad. Lot of project history lost there going back to 1985.

I gave up on local hard drive based backups years ago when two of my external drives, with identical copies of data, crapped out on me and caused me to lose years of family photos, videos, events and memories. I either print out anything important (which is a very smart thing to do, just in case) or I use Dropbox. Used their services since private alpha and have been a faithful user since.

Burn your photos/video files to DVD's for permanent storage. Then, don't lose them.

The best long term storage for digital photos - is to simply print them. A shoebox full of photos will outlast any sort of digital solution.

Hard copies on quality paper will outlast anything. If it is important, MAKE A HARD COPY ON PAPER.

Here's a tip.

Document who or what is in the photo (digital of hard copy). That way when your kids are going through your personal effects while you are a customer at Stevenson's, they won't pitch the box because they have no clue as to the history. Better yet, make them talk to you while you are still taking air and sustenance. Make them aware and interested in what you witnessed in your life. Make them know that was Daddy and Uncle Jack, running moonshine in that '29 Ford because you won't be around any more, to tell the story.

We did some sessions with the folks before they passed, but I wish we had done more of it while we had the chance.

Back in 1967, my father recorded my grandfather telling the stories of his youth, selling Stanley Steamers and running weapons to Pancho Villa. My older brother converted those to CDs. One of these days, we need to update to the next generation but they are wonderful tales.

Redundancy is really the only way to do backups. RAID arrays of some sort or simply creating multiple backups. Smoke, humidity and many other environmental factors play key roles in this as well. You can backup your stuff on 100 separate drives but if they're all in the same building with smoke damage good luck. Really important stuff is best backed up on a RAID array AND on a cloud or other device as well.

Less moving parts is usually a good thing but even flash memory can lose its file structure if someone doesn't eject a disk properly or physical damage occurs somehow. G-Raid and other standalone redundant arrays are a good option for most folks. Using Time Machine on 2 separate drives helps but isn't foolproof.

Keeping personal files and important data on a drive other than your operating system helps too. With Windows systems I always kept these separated over two drives so I could wipe Windows once a year (at least) and start fresh with no backup hassles. Even on my Mac Pro I prefer running separate drives and I've never had to reinstall OSX (tap tap on the oak table).