I don’t want to loose data. I want to win the lottery and retire with a few million Euros at thirty-three.
That’s why I play the lottery when there is a big jackpot, but onto the less exciting topic of keeping my data save.
I use two different storage mediums for backups:
Amazon S3 — off site highly secure storage designed for 99.999999999% durability. There are cheaper solutions, but I’m not going to trade reliability for price — especially considering that at the moment I only pay about fifty cents per month for Amazon S3.
My local storage is a 6TB NAS with double redundancy. Not as save as Amazon S3 but a lot better than an external USB drive.
Which brings us to the actual Data I want to store.
Really valuable data
Backed up to Amazon S3 and the NAS. Luckily this is only a few gigabytes, so it’s really cheap.
Every day data
A fully automated backup of my home directory to the NAS.
Terabytes of archived data
A rapidly growing pool of photos and old research data — definitely too big for the cloud.
Once something is not every day data anymore I manually copy it to the NAS and delete it from my computer. Thus leaving me with a single, but relatively secure copy on a double redundant system.
Extra Bonus
Whenever I plug a specific external USB drive in, a complete bootable backup is created on that disk. Since this is something I have to do manually it’s usually quite outdated. Still with the data from my server I could be working as soon as I have access to another computer.
Final words
I don’t believe this is overkill. My backups are always current and I don’t have multiple outdated copies cluttering my devices. Remember a single backup drive will not keep your data safe for the next forty years.
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