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Started by al uber | | 3 answers
Backup storage solutions
An external hard drive is the quickest and easy way to back up, but a problem for safe storage. Hard drives can be dropped, damaged by magnets, and neutrons. Are blue rays a better way?
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April 14, 2014 5:36:48 AM

Matt and @choucove are right – it’s not about one storage, but a combination. Each has pros and cons, and you should use combination for maximum safety. For quick recovery, single file, or the system if it crashes because of virus, the external HDD is really good. But having just one copy is risk on its own. You should have another copy somewhere – one of the new options is Cloud. Basically there is simple “3-2-1” rule – 3 copies of backups, 2 types of media, at least 1 off-site.

Blu-Rays are not great, 27GB is not really much of data nowadays. And shuffling is a nightmare, believe me.

Best solution chosen by ErAnkurPaul

April 8, 2014 12:11:30 PM

Matt has shared some great advice and information above.

For most of the small businesses and customers that I work with, my recommendations is at least two copies of all data that you can back up. One backup that is your "quick access" backup. This is usually an external hard drive that is left on-premise and is easy and quick to get to if we need to recover something from a previous backup right away. The second backup is an off-site backup. Some like to use cloud-hosted solutions for this, but the old standby of having a second duplicate hard drive works best for us most of the time. The customer brings the hard drive in one day a week, we use an application like Uranium Backup to made a duplicate of the system or the last backup from that first external hard drive and put it onto the off-site hard drive. Then it goes back off site.

When it comes down to it, if you value your data and can't lose it, then it's worth it to back up more than once. After all, it's always better to have more backups than you MIGHT need than to have not enough backups when you really DO need.
April 8, 2014 8:07:11 AM

Nope.

It's not that hard drives are unsafe (any more so than blue rays, for that matter). In reality, there is no perfect storage medium available to the general public for practical applications, such that you could put your only copies of important digital documents on it and breathe easy knowing you'd never have a chance of losing it due to media degradation.

Hard drives are, in actuality, a very GOOD way of storing large amounts of data. Why? Well...they're cheap for the space you get, easy to use, totally enclosed (so they're protected from dust, water, fingers...) and totally reusable. Yes, they do have the shortcomings you've mentioned above, and even some more you didn't, but they're mostly preventable.

Then again, accidents happen, and you still want to be prepared for when they do. The trick is (and this goes for any storage medium you choose) to have your data in more than one physical place. That is, if you're using a hard drive for storage, use ANOTHER hard drive to back it up. Heck, even use ANOTHER hard drive to back up the first backup drive.

My point is that storage media can last a long time, but not forever. Bad luck and circumstance tend to make that time shorter than we'd like more often than not, but it's unlikely that you'll lose 2 hard drives at the same time, and even more unlikely that you'll lose 3 at once. Good storage amounts to good storage habits, not necessarily (or solely) good storage products.

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