I have read a few threads here in the forum and online about the practices of backups just in case things goes wrong.
In short, I heard it is best to backup to multiple places and also to an offsite location just in case something like a fire happens. For offsite, I heard of methods like cloud storage but also heard that some people don’t trust it. Why? If everything is encrypted shouldn’t that not be a problem? Or am I missing something. Is there a better solution for offsite backups?
Cloud storage solutions have been compromised in the past, and some businesses will even give themselves the ability to inspect your files through their TOS. It’s certainly best to make multiple backups, but I wouldn’t personally use cloud storage for my files. Portable HDDs are relatively cheap for 1-2TB.
As a hobbyist, I use an external drive and a portable install of a program called SyncFolders to back up my work. I just set up a rule to compare and copy a project (minus the saved and intermediate folders, which can be regenerated) and just run it at the end of each session.
Yes, that’s basically the reasons I haven’t been using the cloud all this time. But if so, how do you make offsite backups just in case of disasters like fire. Just having a bunch of externals don’t protect against that. I don’t have other family living in the city with me except in my house. So no other buildings I can put it in. I heard some people use the safety deposit at the bank, but I don’t want to use that if possible.
I can recommend you Acronis, it’ll make images that also support incrementation. During one of my games i started using it - it’s fantastic, weekly full image with daily increments so you can always revert back a day. Once setup the backup is fully automatic running in the background. Their software also supports networking so you can store it on a NAS automatically as well. Plus it’s not really expensive.
If you need to store many TeraBytes of data yearly the cheapest and most reliable option is getting an LTO tape drive. The drive itself is expensive if you buy it new like a LTO-6 (2.5TB) or LTO-7 (6TB). The tapes are cheap and read/writing is very fast (seeking being a tape is not as fast as an hard disk of course but it rarely takes more than 60-80seconds on average). There are used LTO-3 (400GB) , LTO-4 (800GB) tape drives at cheap prices on eBay while the LTO-5 (1.5TB) ones are more expensive. LTO-5, LTO-6, LTO-7 feature LTFS file system to virtualize access to the tape drive like it was a removable disk unit.
Thanks for the reply everyone. However, what I am concerned with here is the offsite backup just in case something happen onsite. For the tape drive, where do I store it offsite? For the NAS system on the network, isn’t that similar to the cloud in terms of that someone else owns the hardware? Unless you physically fly out of the city or drive to an offsite location to set up your own NAS.
haha… That’s what I have been up to. Few years ago, I have considered a fire proof safe. But the past few weeks I have been bringing my USB everywhere. So my setup now has been using Winrar with password in USB.
The OneDrive / Googledrive are cloud though? So back to the original discussion of why people don’t trust the cloud…So its ok if everything is encrypted right?
LTO tapes can last 20 to 30 years if correctly stored. For maximum security usually there should be at least 3 copies of everything, storing each copy in a different safe place. It all depends on how much security you want for your data and how much money you can spend to get that. More copies you make more expensive it gets.
