Backups eating your life?

They should be

[tangor]

Once a year (this time of year) I do major backups on all systems and send copies out to six locations across the USA, just in case earthquake, tsunami, hurricane, meteors, IRS, fire, Aunt Polly, etc interfere with my data.

Since 1975 I have backed up on every kind of media possible... and migrated those earliest (now deprecated) media to new media. I have Assembly from 1977 residing next to CSS3 files... how freakin' weird? In sextuplet!

How obsessive are you regarding backups of your data/production/archives?

Do you backup regularly?

Have you ever wished you had done backups when something important vaporized?

We know the sky is blue. We don't know if you backup that assertion. :)

If you have put off doing backups, this is a reminder to do it now.

Note: finally transferred the last of my 8", 5.25" and 3.5" floppies to tape and dvd AND removable hard drives. Had to cobble together a 486 from ancient hardware I have yet to have tossed, running Win 3.1 for Workgroups, copied to Win7 machines over tcp/ip, then burned from there. Then used a wood chipper to reduce a near 2,100 floppies to plastic trash so I won't/can't do that nightmare again. Life is too short!

[lammert]

My backups run automatically daily intercontinental and logs of these backups are sent to my email box each morning. Backup files are stored daily for the first month, weekly for the first year and monthly for older data.

Can't remember when I did backups on local physical media for the last time. Way to many CD and tape failures to use it for long time storage. Still remember the time when I had to convert paper tape backups to magnetic tape. I am getting really old :)

[wslade]

Wow, and I'll bet all your paperclips are stored by size too... I'll commend you on your VERY long term effort!

@lammert, Paper tape? I'm old enough to remember the earth cooling and all I used paper tape for was teletype. IBM key punch cards yes but we had mag tape machines.

...I almost got lost on that walk down memory lane. For my BU I use a 2TB (mirrored) Network Attached Storage. It does an incremental every day and a full on Sunday. I do not do any off site storage but I know that I should.

In what form do you send your data around the US? And why did you choose 6 locations? Have you looked at cloud or data vault storage options? I'm motivated to do off site storage but can't decide what way to do it. I use solid state drives on my server or that would be my choice for off site storage. SSDs are still too pricey for bulk storage. My server is just over 900 miles away (in Chicago).

In case of disaster, I have this vision of me walking out of the house with my NAS under my arm. I know disasters usually don't work that way.

I have had to restore one machine and it was after I began using the NAS. I had one full and 6 months of daily incremental backups. It took a long while to combine the incrementals. That's why I went to my current scheme. As long as my last full BU ran without errors the most incrementals I would need to deal with is 6.

Thanks for the reminder...can you put me down for another reminder...say around April 13 - 14 to pay my taxes?

I'd be interested in hearing suggestions for remote storage. Where, how, why?

[tangor]

My data (personal and business) is stored discrete and private on media I can either hand carry or deliver insured. I do not store any of that in the cloud. Don't trust it for security, nor the networks used to transmit information to and from.

My websites, and those I manage, that's a different situation, so cloud is okay. After all, the sites are on the web.

As for the locations: bank, cpa, attorney, and three family members. I keep, of course, a "seventh" backup on location. The first three listed have everything. The family members have my private stuff such as letters, technical and fiction writing, programming, artwork, music, video,and specialty databases, which files also happen to be things I might leave them upon my death, and at the same time they don't need my business and financial files. All drives are encrypted and only my attorney has the password.

Business side is just under 2 terabytes. The private stuff is half again larger. I use hard drives for these, one in state 250 miles away, another three states away, two six and seven states away and one "way up north". Tape and hard drive incremental on site... belt and suspenders. But once a year I do the full times 6 (I suppose that should actually read 3 full and 3 private) so that at any given time I am no worse then "a year" off. Each year I send/deliver the drives and pick up the ones from the previous year. Those I open, test for reliability, then secure erase and reformat for use in house, or for next year's backup(s).

I'm not so sure my "commitment" isn't more properly read as "commit to asylum". I just can't seem to get rid of things, though the shelf space recovered by chopping up those floppies is greatly appreciated! Now I can display my collection of action figures. (wink)

And I didn't start using paperclips until after I got rid of all the floppies. :)