Best backup solution for my life?

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MIPS64

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I currently have a 200GB external hard drive that I've been using to backup the last 12 years of my life with. It's getting full and also old, so I am not sure how much longer I want to push it.

DVD's are not practical, Blu-ray discs are still expensive. What do you think, dual hard drives in RAID1 for redundancy? I would be too concerned getting a single hard drive like I have now and I don't want to do an online solution.
 
MIPS64 said:
Blu-ray discs are still expensive. What do you think, dual hard drives in RAID1 for redundancy? I would be too concerned getting a single hard drive like I have now and I don't want to do an online solution.
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You can get no-name 25GB blu-ray blanks for under a buck, decent media for about a buck and name brand for about 1.50 a disc. If you want some sort of redundancy, get 2 separate disks and keep them in separate locations (geographically apart if possible)
 
Yes, don't use RAID1, RAID isn't a backup.

If a file becomes corrupt or deleted on 1 drive, RAID1 will ensure it becomes corrupted or deleted on the other drive too!

Why not online backup solutions? They are very cheap and some are very secure. If you are paranoid, try Crashplan which lets you use your own private encryption key so nobody else could possibly ever read your data, not even the company running the servers.

Or truecrypt your data before sending it to the cloud, or both o_O.

If it's bandwidth caps you are worried about then yea it might not be the solution for you.

I just recommend online backup as it protects against theft, and natural disaster where as your own backups don't usually unless you go through the hassle of backing up to an external regularly and taking the drive down to the back to store in a safebox.
 
what are you planning on protecting against / what is the most serious threat to your data?
physical destruction (fire / natural disaster) or theft?
hardware failure?
data corruption?

you cant mitigate a threat unless you can identify it... RAID1 would only work against hardware failures. RAID5/6 would work against hardware failure and data corruption (but still remember that RAID isnt a backup). cloud services would work against physical destruction and hardware failure very well (usually all online providers are well RAIDed, and keep geologically distributed copies), and to a varying extent data corruption.
 
ghost6303 asks the right questions.

A safe deposit box or a friend's garage are good locations to keep your data.

I think hard drives are good. Make several copies each of two 1-2TB hard drives. Replace the drives every 3-5 years.
 
archive the current disk and switch to whatever new disk you want. use crashplan for offsite backup.
 
Use MD5 checksums on every file, to ensure that data has not been subject to bit rot over time. For instance, my old Amiga discs does not work today, they have been bit rot. You also need to run checksums on every file regularly, and if there is a checksum change, you need to recover the file from a backup.

Or use ZFS, which does automagically does all checksumming for you. And it also automagically recovers and repairs files subject to checksum changes.
 
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