Current Thought on Data Backup Strategy

Just read this interesting perspective on data BACKUP:

http://www.pcworld.com …cw_bestof_html_​2016-03-04

I remember when DVD disks with the vegetable coating layer were the touted as THE backup media that would last at least 100 years. Truth be told I still use them for short term use but I don't assume they'll last forever

Back up to external bare HDD's using a drive dock.

One is none, and two is one!

Right now I back up to multiple hard drives. My really important data (photos and such) is on my main drive (RAID1 mirror) plus another drive in the house and another at work. I use the new Microsoft ReFS file system on internal and external disks, as it has error checking and correction, which is similar to ZFS. I also have small and critical data backed up to CrashPlan - not images many right now (just my wedding photos), but documents and such.

Given I can now get a fiber connection that's 200Mbps up and virtually no data cap I'm considering online archives. Not a mirror or backup service that most people would use, but a proper one. Amazon Glacier has 99.999999999% durability per year, with data being stored in multiple data centers and continually checked that it's not been corrupted. As temporary backups I'm also use Amazon S3 IAS (infrequently accessed storage), which has 99.99% durability per year - far better than any hard drive. The thing about Amazon is it's a bit more complex that most people would really like, so you probably need either a backup service or a backup program to help. Glacier is $7/TB/month or so, S3 is around $12/TB/month in the cheapest region (Oregon).

So here's what would be practical now for people with fast internet connections:
- Large amounts of unchanging data archived to Amazon glacier : wedding photos (customers and personal), personal photos, older documents
- Current data that might change, or I haven't archived yet, in Amazon S3. This wouldn't be a mirror, this would be done as an incremental backup.

OR

- Incremental backups of everything stored on two offsite hard drives in two locations.
- A cloud backup service making sure my work hard drive is backed up, photos and all
- Glacier storing jpeg copies of all important images (wedding events, my wedding, personal photos by year) as a second line backup

skid00skid00 wrote in post #17923301
Back up to external bare HDD's using a drive dock.

One is none, and two is one!

Yep - that plus a DROBO and another external HD.

I use drivepool and have it set to store 2 copies of my photography folder (and some misc important documents stuff folder)on two different drives in case one fails, then I have crashplan backup that same data to an external drive, and then that plus about 2TB of stuff on the cloud.

This way I have my important stuff triple backed up, and less important stuff is just in the cloud. Only thing I am missing is a physically accessible offsite backup. Crashplan can do that too.

The main consideration that i have about data archiving is not the media type (HD vs. SSD vs. tape) but the INTERFACE, because it seems that while you might have data archived on a 10 year old HD, getting the data off the harddrive 10 years into the future might be problematic when the connection standards have changed yet again.

Harddrives, for example, over the decades have used these interface types: ST-506, SCSI, IDE, ATA, SATA I, SATA II, SATA III, and now PCIe x4
Now try to find an ST-506 controller to fit a PC manufactured today, so you can plug it in and get data off of the old HD. Or get an ATA controller.

Even USB ports evolve, and it may not be inconceivable that USB has evolved and then been replaced with some new external port standard, and how do you plug in your old USB 2.0 enclosure HD to get data off of it when that happens?!

So far the only 'standard' that seems to endure is the ethernet connection, and PCs have had ethernet of increasing speeds, but things which can be connected 20 years ago via ethernet are compatible withj today's faster ethernet. And Apple ethernet works fine with PC ethernet, even if Apple has adopted its own external port connector (as it does from time to time).

In spite of what they say, USB 3.0 is not necessarily plug compatible with USB 2.0 as I recently discovered. I have a USB 2.0 external DVD unit with USB 2.0 cable, and when I plugged it into my USB 3.0 port on my HP laptop, it would NOT read the data on the inserted DVD...moved it to the USB 2.0 port of the same laptop it worked fine!

Backups do need to be migrated to modern media and formats. Consider a 15 year old RAW file stored on a floppy disk (yes a Sony camera stored files on floppy disks years back) - you can't read the file, and if you could there might not be software support to decode it.

tim wrote in post #17945925
Backups do need to be migrated to modern media and formats. Consider a 15 year old RAW file stored on a floppy disk (yes a Sony camera stored files on floppy disks years back) - you can't read the file, and if you could there might not be software support to decode it.

And if we ourselves are diligent in the media migration, eventually after we pass our grandkids will not be interested in the labor to keep Grandpa Tim's photos around and accessible, so his photos of early 21st century life, when we still burned fossil fuel in things called 'cars', are lost to the historians and paleontologists of the future. <sigh>

How many remember what a Mavica was?!

UUENCODE your files and laser engrave them into stone tablets.