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How do you backup your data at home?
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(Score: 4, Insightful) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday September 01 2015, @04:04PM
Not to bust balls here but judging by the current poll status, people don't really seem to care about their data.
USB drives and NAS aren't good backup devices. Sure they can save you when your main disk dies but what happens when your house burns down or is destroyed by in some disaster? USe a laptop? They are prime targets for theft. I saw the aftermath of hurricane sandy and let me tell you, anything that the water touched was thrown in the trash. I have also known people who lost everything in a house fire. Friend of mine recently had his home burn down to the ground. As in there wasn't anything left as it took firefighters nearly 30 minutes to reach his rural home. By the time they did, it was completely consumed and their concern was preventing it from spreading. That is really scary stuff which will wipe out one or more lifetimes of memories, keepsakes and data in just a few minutes.
I get it that many don't trust cloud storage because of hacking/snooping/spying etc. But ignoring it and thinking your local data is safe is a really bad idea. My advice is to keep local and remote backups. You don't have to remote everything, just the most important and irreplaceable stuff. And if you are paranoid, use your own remote backup scheme using Unix tools like tar, pbzip2, rsync, and custom encryption tied together with a script.
Another decent remote backup idea is to split two NAS devices with a trustworthy friend or relative. You can backup to their device and they can backup to yours while you both make locals to your respective devices. This way you both have two copies, one remote and one local. All you need is encryption and you're all set. They can't read your backup data and you can't read theirs. The only upfront cost is the NAS devices. Then it's simply monthly electric for keeping the units on and internet. Though, you have to monitor and maintain them for disk failures.
(Score: 1) by Cyrano de Maniac on Wednesday September 02 2015, @06:38PM
To be fair to the poll respondents, selecting a backup media as a poll option says nothing about the physical location (onsite vs. offsite) of the backups themselves.
"External USB disk" may well mean "multiple copies thereof, one stored locally and one offsite". Or to flip things around "Cloud" could theoretically mean "My homebrewed cloud implementation sitting in the basement of my house".
While I have slacked recently, in the past I kept a duplicate set of home backup tapes at my work office. If something managed to wipe out both my house and my workplace simultaneously, it's likely Armageddon is nigh and the status of my backups isn't of much concern. Maybe this wouldn't be quite true in a flood, hurricane, or earthquake vulnerable area, or if you're worried about non-geologic timescales, nuclear annihilation, foreign invasion, or extinction-level events, but for my locale and lifespan the "second copy in my desk at work" solution is perfectly sufficient.
(Score: 1) by Cyrano de Maniac on Wednesday September 02 2015, @06:40PM
s/non-//
Dang "spent more time rewording this than writing it" phenomena.
(Score: 1) by Osamabobama on Wednesday September 02 2015, @09:05PM
Also, the poll only allows one choice. I spend more time moving things to my NAS (my response) than I do backing up to the cloud, because much of the cloud backup is automatic, and the NAS requires manual movement of files.
All my photos end up on a Google server, often before I see them. Sometimes, they even get edited for me, probably by a robot. I assume there are also robots watching vacation slide shows, so save my friends and family from having to see them.
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