3-2-1
3 copies (1 working copy, 2 backups)
on :
2 different kinds of media or devices
and of those:
1 offsite
Other stuff:
- USB flash drives are worse, overall, for reliability than DVD's or hard drives. This goes doubly and triply for cheap USB flash drives. I run across users with lost data almost weekly from crap thumbdrives
- Consider using a cloud based backup system. I have about 1.5 TB stored in Mozy now, at a cost of $5 per month. Even if you don't use a cloud based system, if you are serious about backups you must have one copy offsite. Theft/fire/technical problem/stupidity could all render your local copies useless.
- Mozy is owned by EMC, a huge player in the storage market. I highly doubt they are going away. All of the big online backup providers encrypt the data before it leaves your machine, and don't have the key, so even if hackers got your data, they'd have to break the encryption.
- Test your backups. Just because you get a directory listing from a DVD doesn't mean the data is there an intact. Copy off a couple photos and open them up. Do this monthly. Backups are useless if you don't know that you can pull data back from them. I do this with Mozy as well - every month I pull a couple files down from the cloud and verify they were stored intact.
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-Scott
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