A safer way to backup files other than external Hard Drive?

Archibald wrote in post #17842563
So if you lose everything, how long to restore 2TB from the cloud?

Depending on who you use you can simply contact them and have them send you a drive loaded with all your files.

Archibald wrote in post #17842563
So if you lose everything, how long to restore 2TB from the cloud?

I recently had to re-upload 1.1 TB of mostly uncompressible data to Crashplan. It took about 24 days at 5 Mbps. My download speed is almost 60 Mbps but I don't know if Crashplan or my ISP would sustain that speed over a long period. But you'd likely be looking at anywhere from a few days to a few weeks to download everything. It still beats losing everything in local disaster that wipes out your backups too.

Archibald wrote in post #17842685
... keep things simple...

Agreed: it should be as simple as needed to accomplish all that is necessary.

For me, the simple are the external drives. If the system needs restore, it starts with the latest backup from one of the external drives. That could be enough.

The scattered items, USB, Optical, etc, are backup to the external drives.

I doubt multiple external drives and the system they are backing up would hardware fail at the same time, but a replacement system will probably have new hardware and a newer O/S and is not guaranteed to work with the old backup until after you succeed.

Backup is like insurance, you hope you never need it.

Storage fails. It's not if. It's when. Sometimes you can scrape you information off sometimes you can't.

Archibald wrote in post #17842563
So if you lose everything, how long to restore 2TB from the cloud?

well I only have 350 gb of photos my information data is much less. Since this is not a business for me I would not have to restore it all at once. It did take a while to put it the cloud. My home area is scheduled to get google fiber in the near future so that will make it a lot easier! I think the is gb a second capacity up or down

With the cost of externals these days, it's easier and quicker to just keep a few around. I just picked up a Western digital 2tb for $80 over the holiday.

gjl711 wrote in post #17842934
With the cost of externals these days, it's easier and quicker to just keep a few around. I just picked up a Western digital 2tb for $80 over the holiday.

Unfortunately with the high MP cameras of today, we consume 5X the storage space for each photo we take, rather than only 10MB per photo 10 years ago.
So where we used to fill 500GB HD with 50K photos, we now need 2.5TB HD to hold 50K photos!

Wilt wrote in post #17842976
Unfortunately with the high MP cameras of today, we consume 5X the storage space for each photo we take, rather than only 10MB per photo 10 years ago.
So where we used to fill 500GB HD with 50K photos, we now need 2.5TB HD to hold 50K photos!

But even so, 50,000 photos is an obscene amount and at $60~$70 a disk, that's still pretty cheap.

gjl711 wrote in post #17843338
But even so, 50,000 photos is an obscene amount and at $60~$70 a disk, that's still pretty cheap.

Then it must be even more obscene that there are folks (not necessarily 'pros', and not a small number of them, it seems) who fire their cameras that much within 2 years.

or save all the photos they take seriously there are that many keepers? spray and pray photography?

If your a spray and prayer and a image hoarder, then toss in an additional $70 and get another hard drive.

there are some great HD ext enclosures http://www.rosewill.co​m …uminum-abs-plastic-1.html even if you do not have an e sata this one will do 500mbps over usb 3.0 esata is faster

I recently spent a few days copying over videos files from CD -R's for my family.
While they are great for putting in and playing a home movie, they are the only copies they had.

They are keeping the 40-50 discs also, should one HDD fail, the discs are still quite handy.

dashotgun wrote in post #17843945
there are some great HD ext enclosures http://www.rosewill.co​m …uminum-abs-plastic-1.html even if you do not have an e sata this one will do 500mbps over usb 3.0 esata is faster

USB 3.0 can do 5 Gbps while SATA3 can do 6 Gbps. Either is faster than a hard drive. SSDs are a different story which is why we're seeing USB 3.1, Thunderbolt, and PCIe connected M.2 interfaces catch on.

Cloud storage or even multiple cloud storages. You could use 2 different companies too. It's also pretty nice to be able to access your cloud storage backups from ANYWHERE and from any mobile device.

BlakeC wrote in post #17844320
Cloud storage or even multiple cloud storages. You could use 2 different companies too. It's also pretty nice to be able to access your cloud storage backups from ANYWHERE and from any mobile device.

I've considered this too. You just want to do your research and make sure they're not both using the same underlying platform, such as AWS. Ideally, each backup provider would run their own data centers in different cities.