I know that backups and file retention have been discussed in various threads, but I thought I'd start a new one. I'm a certified continuity and recovery person and realized that I had become a little lax in my personal practices. I made a New Year's resolution to clean up my act. I hope this discussion may help others to not lose their own data.
The key to retention is redundancy. All media will fail. If you can accept that premise and act on it, you have a great start. Using this as a starting point, what is a prudent approach to ensuring you don't loose your stuff? Multiple copies in multiple locations is the key.
Here is my method:
Below is a Mac representation of implementing physically separate OS and data drives as well as Time Machine.
So what process do you use?
The key to retention is redundancy. All media will fail. If you can accept that premise and act on it, you have a great start. Using this as a starting point, what is a prudent approach to ensuring you don't loose your stuff? Multiple copies in multiple locations is the key.
Here is my method:
- Physically separate data from the operating system. (This is prudent whether you use Windows, OS X, Linux or any other operating system.)
- Implement some sort of automated copy/backup method. (In my case I use OS X's Time Machine with a USB drive.)
- Make a second copy of the data. (In my case I periodically copy files to my RAID 1 enabled NAS.)
- Get a tertiary copy of the data offsite. (I recently implemented Backblaze to automate this process.)
Below is a Mac representation of implementing physically separate OS and data drives as well as Time Machine.
So what process do you use?