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If this has been discussed before, please let me know, right now city-data is unable to perform a search. I'd like opinions as to the best way to back up your files nowadays. I'm on a Mac and I'm old school - I bought an external hard drive and was using that. Do most of you still do that or do you backup online? I think there are some free sites to use but I am unsure about doing it that way. How secure is it, etc. It is mostly personal files and photos that I need to backup. I used to use CDs, but I don't need a ton of CDs sitting around, and sometimes they go bad. Thank you....
1. External drive with 2 partitions:
a. Enough space for a complete clone backup. SuperDuper! is the best backup software to use.
b. Enough space for Time Machine archiving.
SuperDuper! is to solve the "my internal hard drive just failed" problem.
Time Machine is to solve the "I did not mean to delete that file and empty the trash" problem.
2. Cloud for absolutely essential files.
In my case. QuickBooks for my business, 1Password as I manage 600 logins.
If this has been discussed before, please let me know, right now city-data is unable to perform a search. I'd like opinions as to the best way to back up your files nowadays. I'm on a Mac and I'm old school - I bought an external hard drive and was using that. Do most of you still do that or do you backup online? I think there are some free sites to use but I am unsure about doing it that way. How secure is it, etc. It is mostly personal files and photos that I need to backup. I used to use CDs, but I don't need a ton of CDs sitting around, and sometimes they go bad. Thank you....
I'm doing the same thing you did, I use an external drive for each of the pc's here at home. I've never lost pictures or documents so far doing this even after I had an issue with the laptop which required a complete cleaning and reinstalling to make it work correctly. I'm happy with having a physical external drive. IMO
I have a SSD for OS and applications, anything that can be replaced. I also and two regular drives, the two regular drives are in RAID1 configuration which in my opinion is the single best thing you can do to prevent data loss. I moved all the "My *" folders like pictures, documents there. By default that is where everything gets saved.
With RAID1 configuration each drive is a mirror. They are monitored for health and if one fails which is the most common way people lose data you'll know about it immediately and you'll have the other drive fully functional with all your files. From there you would take steps to replace the faulty drive in the array. You also get a small boost in read performance since you can read parts of the same file from both drives simultaneously. This isn't full proof and nothing really is but again if you have a disk failure you have spare copy sitting right there that is 100% up to date.
How this may fail is either both drives fail at once which is an unlikely scenario or data corruption.
The first one can be fixed with an external drive, preferably two of them with one being stored offsite like relatives house and swap them out occasionally. Granted you won't be able to keep it up to date easily but in the event of something like a house fire you'll be happy you have something.
Data corruption is important because this is something people fail to consider no matter what there backup plan is. For example suppose you're writing out your life story in Word and accidentally delete half the pages and save it. You still have copy on your backup but if your backup plan includes overwriting that backup it's gone.... As far as how you easily make revision backups with Windows I don't know but would love to hear some suggestions on backup software with revisions.
As far as the offsite online storage that's an option too but be aware you should not trust your data to third party as your only form of backup.
I have no clue how to set up a RAID system, it sounds complicated.
Wasn't hard on Windows and it was actually setup in the BIOS. The only issue I ran into was the BOS on boot when I first enabled it because apparently Windows wouldn't recognize the RAID array out of the box unless it was already configured when you formatted. Took a little bit of research but I got it working.
Keep in mind there is different RAID configurations, you want RAID1 for redundancy. RAID0 for example is for performance and will increase the chances of data loss.
I use XXClone to back up my HD to an external drive of the same capacity in a USB enclosure. If your HD goes TU, just swap in the external drive and you're back in business. Get a new drive for the enclosure and clone again. This has gotten my back up twice and eliminated the need to reload everything. I repeat cloning weekly so I don't get too far behind.
FWIW
YMMV
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Belt and Suspenders
