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There is no such thing as online backup. By definition backup must not be online. Physical presence and offline media is required. http://www.taobackup.com/

In addition "once in a while" does not seem to be very reassuring :) I have already paid a large sum for hard disk recovery service.

Since then I am a follower of the Tao of Backup/

The Tao of Backup:

http://www.taobackup.com/

A novice wanted to learn the Tao of Backup.
The master said: "To become enlightened, you
must master the seven heads of Backup. He who
knows the heads will keep all his data forever.
He who knows them will lose all his data",
and with that the lessons began...

And no, I do not use spinning media as a backup. I use tapes. Using spinning media for proper backups is almost impossible. See http://www.taobackup.com/

Your link doesn't really seem to explain how using "spinning media for proper backups is almost impossible", so you'll either need to point to exactly where it says that, provide some other reference, or expand on that on your own.

Using spinning media for proper backups is almost impossible. See http://www.taobackup.com/

There is nothing in that story to suggest that HDDs are considered inappropriate for backup media. What is your theory? I've used HDDs for deduplicating daily snapshots for the last 15+ years and found them to be every bit as reliable as tapes, and far far easier to use.

The relevant table is on 27. page.

In short: if you use the SSD in a cold environment AND store it in hot environment than you may lose data quite quickly. Quicker than two weeks.

Client drives are also affected, but the data loss occurs slighly later. I guess reason of the difference is that enerprise drives assume a higher work temperature.

So the advice is that if you use the SSD in your air conditioned basement in a good case then do not store your SSD on the sun for extended periods.

And no, I do not use spinning media as a backup. I use tapes. Using spinning media for proper backups is almost impossible. See http://www.taobackup.com/

http://taobackup.com/

an elderly relative they took in did not: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...
"The Dutch famine of 1944, known as the Hongerwinter ("Hunger winter") in Dutch, was a famine that took place in the German-occupied part of the Netherlands, especially in the densely populated western provinces above the great rivers, during the winter of 1944-1945, near the end of World War II. A German blockade cut off food and fuel shipments from farm areas. Some 4.5 million were affected and survived because of soup kitchens. About 22,000 died because of the famine. Most vulnerable according to the death reports were elderly men. ... After the national railways complied with the exiled Dutch government's appeal for a railway strike starting September 1944 to further the Allied liberation efforts, the German administration retaliated by placing an embargo on all food transports to the western Netherlands. By the time the embargo was partially lifted in early November 1944, allowing restricted food transports over water, the unusually early and harsh winter had already set in. The canals froze over and became impassable for barges. ..."

So yes, it is the height of foolishness that the USA has reduced its food stocks to bare minimums for "just in time" delivery. I read somewhere a few years ago that the USA was divesting itself of its government reserve grain supplies too. It is even more insanity to convert grain to fuel. A trillion dollars a year or more for security spending in the USA, and the government can't even get the basics right...

See also:
http://articles.latimes.com/20...
"But when it comes to food prices, our country cannot even threaten to bolster the national supply because the United States does not possess a national grain reserve. Such was not always the case. The modern concept of a strategic grain reserve was first proposed in the 1930s by Wall Street legend Benjamin Graham. ... In the inflationary 1970s, the USDA revamped FDR's program into the Farmer-Owned Grain Reserve, which encouraged farmers to store grain in government facilities by offering low-cost and even no-interest loans and reimbursement to cover the storage costs. But over the next quarter of a century the dogma of deregulated global markets came to dominate American politics, and the 1996 Freedom to Farm Act abolished our national system of holding grain in reserve. As for all that wheat held in storage, it became part of the Bill Emerson Humanitarian Trust, a food bank and global charity under the authority of the secretary of Agriculture. The stores were gradually depleted until 2008, when the USDA decided to convert all of what was left into its dollar equivalent. And so the grain that once stabilized prices for farmers, bakers and American consumers ended up as a number on a spreadsheet in the Department of Agriculture. Now, as the United States must confront climate change, commodity markets riddled by speculation, increased import costs, hosts of regional conflicts and the return of international grain tariffs and export bans, we have put our faith entirely in transnational agribusiness and the global grain market. ..."

More neoliberal neocon madness... But most people in the USA did not have a parent who saw a relative starve to death during wartime... You always think the basic services will be there -- until you test them in a crisis and they are not...
"Neoliberalism as a Water Balloon"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Or also:
http://www.taobackup.com/testi...
"No matter how sophisticated or comprehensive your backup system is, you will never know if it works unless you actually test it. Without testing, you can have no confidence at all. Here are

Killthre... I mean The Tao of Backup

it's swings and roundabouts, though. If you only have your own copy and it's not online somewhere, then you're at risk of theft, fire, flood, magnets, children pouring water on your pc etc etc. A professionally backed up cloud is way safer.

It's safer to say "If you care about it you have your own copy AND a copy on the cloud".

True. Or have your own copies in multiple locations. It doesn't have to be some buzzword-compliant cloud service.

And if it is information that you don't want to disclose, take appropriate measures. For example, store the copies in encrypted form, and keep multiple, password-protected copies of the key.

Also, make sure to regularly verify that your backups can be restored, and that this gives you everything you would need after a restore.

Of course, all of this is covered in The Tao Of Backup

I'd link to the Tao of Backup, although that is more for Buddhists.

Sadly it comes to pass that every generation the Tao of Backup is forgotten and must be relearned through such trial by fire. http://www.taobackup.com/

http://taobackup.com/

Don't use raid-1. Raid isn't a backup solution. Raid-1 will only protect you if one of your drives becomes corrupt, but if you get a virus or somebody accidentally deletes a folder, then every drive in your array is screwed. Disks in a raid array can also prove to be difficult to migrate to a different machine.

Instead, just store all the files on your computer and get a number of removable hard-drives. Plug one of the removable drives into your computer and set your computer up to backup all of your data to that drive every night (rsync works for this, but there's a glut of backup software out there if you don't want to write your own script). Then, every week, rotate the backup drive.

For bonus points, make your backup script email you with the results of every backup, and store your unplugged backups off-site. If off-site is too inconvenient, consider a water/fire-proof safe.

The Tao of Backup is a good read on this subject.

Oops. Someone missed the 3rd step in the Tao of Backup : separation

That list again in full:

Backup all your data

Backup frequently

Take some backups off-site

Keep some old backups

Test your backups

Secure your backups

Perform integrity checking

And note that it's not necessary to purchase anything to achieve backup enlightenment.

Oops. Someone missed the 3rd step in the Tao of Backup : separation

That list again in full:

Backup all your data

Backup frequently

Take some backups off-site

Keep some old backups

Test your backups

Secure your backups

Perform integrity checking

And note that it's not necessary to purchase anything to achieve backup enlightenment.

Copying data to a single IDE drive and calling it "backup" is just pathetic.

He should read the Tao of Backup http://www.taobackup.com/ and be enlightend.

http://www.taobackup.com

The novice was growing impatient on the road to enlightenment. "Master, as a follower of the Tao, I am taking regular backups of all my files. I am archiving them securely offsite, and testing them using Veracity. Surely, master, I am enlightened now?"

The backup master said only: "You will not achieve enlightenment until you control the integrity of your data, for a copy is useless if the original is corrupt. What use is a mirror if we cannot see? What use is an echo if we cannot hear?" But the novice did not understand.

Later the novice returned. "Master," he said, "a cracker on the Internet penetrated my network six months ago and has been corrupting random files ever since. These hundreds of corrupted files have been flowing through my backup system. Now I do not know which files are clean and which are not. I do not know which backups hold the latest clean copy of each file. What should I do?"

But the master was silent.

On the other side of the world, the cracker laughed.

From The Tao Of Backup: 7, Integrity
http://www.taobackup.com/integrity.html

Regardless of which method you choose to go for, don't forget the principles of the Tao of Backup! "Upon hearing this, the master fell silent." dreaver

As for media protection, as several people suggested, rent a safe deposit at a bank (or several boxes at geographically separated banks). You get heavily fire protected vault space for a fairly low annual rent.

If you're using tape media, you should also periodically try reading your backup tapes on a different drive than the one you wrote them on, to make sure they interoperate. Drives can get out of alignment and will keep working with their own tapes but stop interoperating with other drives.