Backups - Was: Help, my disk array has one dead member

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Thu, 23 Mar 2017 18:44:41 +1100, Karl Auer wrote:
>On Wed, 2017-03-22 at 22:14 -0700, Kevin O'Gorman wrote:
>> And background: I've lost data before, like my PhD research back
>> around 1999.  Eeek!  
>
>In 1993 (?) I was doing PC support at the the Australian National
>University. Saw three or four lost souls traipse in with a few floppies
>or a hard disk containing the only copy of their thesis or their PhD
>data, asking plaintively if we could help. We rarely could, and there
>was no way they could pay the big bucks that were needed for
>professional data recovery. Sometimes that had printouts that were only
>a few weeks or months old...
>
>Easy to laugh, but for those people the loss was a palpable tragedy,
>and one of the main reasons I am completely anal about backups - mine
>and my customers'.
>
>And I am still angry when I think that their supervisors, or their
>Faculties, didn't tell them how to back up, and just let them lose
>literally years of work.
>
>It is *amazing* how many people have literally never considered the
>idea that they might one day just lose all their data. How can anyone
>in this day and age not have thought about their laptop, tablet, phone 
>or desktop being lost or stolen, or just failing one day?

Private users might only be able to make more secure backups, when
using a cloud. I don't want to use a cloud.

I backup all my data to external USB HDDs, this is better than nothing,
but not completely secure, since the drives are in the same flat as
the computer is. Even if we should store the backup drives in another
location, at least when doing the backup, the drives are in the same
location. Sure, we could have at least two backup drives and only have
one drive at a time in the same location as the computer, but this could
become annoying.

Apart from the fire and water issue it's also possible that all drives
fail at the same time. Something unlikely isn't impossible. When I made
a practicum in the 80s at the media centre of the Fachhochschule Essen,
all "high quality", "professional" analog video tapes lost the magnetic
layer from the carrier layer. IOW if we nowadays buy backup drives, we
should consider to use different vendors and different batches of those
vendors and even if the drives are still 100% ok, regularly make
backups of the backups to new drives and keep both, the old and the new
backups, something nearly impossible for private users, because of the
costs for the drives, as well as the warehousing.

Acid-free paper and indelible ink more likely survive firefighting
operations than modern electrical gear. Stone tablet might be the best
media to archive something. In 2000 years archaeologist might discover
more interesting findings from the Stone Age, the ancient Egyptians,
than from our current cultures. Sure, they will find a lot of waste
providing information, permanent repository for nuclear waste, but
less written words, paintings and things like this.

Regards,
Ralf