Recently a family in our neighborhood lost their home to a house fire that from the outside appears to have consumed pretty much everything in their home. The good news is they all go out safely. This is the fifth home to burn in our little neighborhood since we moved in about 32 years ago.
Mt. Cammerer Firetower |
Right now I have 3.4 terabytes of system and data disks, plus 3.2 terabytes of backup disks. Every night my system makes backup copies of my files. When (not if) I have a hard drive crash I can buy a new one and put all my files back. Because all these disks are in the same physical place a house fire or a waterline break in the kitchen above my computer could destroy the original files and all the backups. All gone.
I decided to find a way to save my photos should a disaster occur at home. I checked out out a couple online backup services to backup my files to "the cloud" on the internet. In theory, if my PC is destroyed I can eventually replace it and restore all my important files to the new computer. I loaded a 30 day evaluation copy of one of the leading services and found it was going to take a month to back up what I had on my hard drives! With the number of images I load to my PC after a big trip this system could take days to catch up.
I have decided to give up on the cloud backup until my internet service provider offers better upload speeds. Instead I purchased a portable hard drive that can be attached to my PC via a USB 3.0 port. I then back up my pictures, documents, music and other important files to this disk and store it in my office at work. A low tech but low cost solution. The key is to be disciplined to bring the disk home periodically and make a new backup.
I'm going to keep doing my backups on my computer in addition to the offsite backup. Nothing wrong with doing both.
What do you do to protect your important files?
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