Listen pal, I know you hippies live in fantasy world of employee unions and benefits, but how do you expect to get your brand new unlocked IPhone for only a few bucks, loaded with tons of free-to-download applications if they didn't have that kind of labor practice?
Some of us would gladly give that up if employees were paid decently. It's called human compassion. I know it's a novel concept for some but geeks aren't immune to it.
1) The cheapest 100 pack of single layer DVD+R's from a decent brand I can find on newegg.com is: Data 4.7GB 16X DVD+R 100 pack is $17.99 / 470GB = 3.8 cents / GB
2) The cheapest 500GB hard drive I could find is: Samsun HD502HI 500GB SATA 300 is $49.99 / 500GB = 9.9 cents / GB...and how many of those cheap as chips discs are going to misburn? What's the warranty period on those?
Also you're better off looking at 1TB if you want best price per GB on the drive.
You look like an uninformed jackass because you are one
Yeah you write bogus comparisons and believe marketing nonsense with zero evidence and I'm the one that's the jackass. If you believe that there's nothing I can do or say thats worse than what you're doing to yourself.
You really aren't worth the time refuting. None of your arguments hold up.
For starters we could enforce the existing laws. Caught talking on your cellphone twice, hand over your license. That has the same problem as the get-tough license revocations for DUI. A scofflaw who drives while talking on the phone or while drunk (or talking on the phone while drunk) is the same kind of scofflaw who will drive without a license after it's been revoked and drive without insurance after the policy is canceled. Pass all the laws you want, they'll be happy to break them all!
We can't even teach people to signal turns and lane changes reliably. Teaching cell phone safety to the public is about as likely to happen as someone winning the lottery jackpot 37 times in a row by finding discarded tickets in the street.
Yeah that's the way. We CAN'T teach people. Let's give up and rely on technology to keep us safe. Then wonder why people are killed on the roads. We need to do better with training not be fatalistic about it.
FAA regulations prohibit talking about non-flying related things between crew members during takeoff and landing approaches, and a violation of this reg was blamed for causing a crash near Buffalo earlier this year.
That's because those regulations are often ignored. The pilot who crashed also had falsified his record which included other serious incidents. It wasn't just a case of some great pilot who got chatty and killed everyone.
All the existing laws are "feel good" laws for sanctimonious pricks. All the studies that have been published show that it isn't the act of holding a phone up to your ear that causes a driver to be distracted, it is simply talking on the phone that matters. But all of the laws give free passes to anyone with a handsfree phone. That's arguably worse than holding the phone to your ear - if you do that, at least the other drivers have a chance of noticing that you are on the phone and giving you a wide berth, handsfree makes you look like all the other drivers even though you are not as engaged with the road as they are.
All the existing studies are biased with the aim of creating or tightening laws and increasing associated fines. I'm yet to see a study that takes distracted drivers, teaches them to cope with the distraction and compares their performance before and after. I don't accept that anyone on the phone in their car is a danger. I do think those who've had no practice and training are a danger.
One difference is that he is talking on the radio ABOUT what he is doing. His brain isn't focused on flirting with the ATC. Another difference is that the ATC knows when to shut the hell up and let the pilot do his job if something goes wrong, just like someone in the passenger seat would. But someone on the other end of the phone may not even know he is talking to a driver.
ATC often can't tell what your immediate situation is until you report it. It's the pilot's job to prioritise the communication. Also transgressions do take place with ATC and pilots talking about things they shouldn't. (There have also been accidents where it's a contributing factor, but I still say a pilot has a much better chance of focusing on what's necessary than the average motorist).
Part of the training needs to be learning when to ignore the conversation and focus on what's happening BEFORE you've managed to get into dire straights. Another part needs to be when to hang up and switch off your phone. Spending an hour on the phone flirting with someone is not appropriate but why does it have to either be that or a total ban. Where's the scope to apply common sense and logic?
Lets say you block cell phone usage. Does your technology exclude calls to emergency services? If not that's going to lead to deaths. Does your technology differentiate between the driver and a passenger? (I don't know how you'd even try to do that).
For starters we could enforce the existing laws. Caught talking on your cellphone twice, hand over your license.
Better would be to teach drivers to better cope with distractions including cell phone usage. If a pilot be required to be communicating on a radio while they land and take off - in a fast moving vehicle that falls out of the sky if not kept within parameters, at the edge of those parameters - I think drivers can be taught to drive safely on a cell phone. Not just left to their own devices to work out how, but taught. Where are the studies on how effective it is to teach drivers to drive while distracted by cell phones and other modern devices?
So you'd rather lock up the picture and let no one see it, and you want sympathy? If you don't want to donate it, how about you sell the picture to the publicist? How much are you going to make ON AVERAGE on a picture if you retain the rights? Not how much will your best most popular picture sell for? THAT would be a reasonable price.
I'm an amateur photographer and stuff like this is exactly why I'm not willing to go Pro. I've shot a few weddings for friends and family. (Mentioning this infuriates most professionals and/or draws insults) The friends/fmaily get the RAW files. They get the pictures YOU would discard in order to protect your reputation as a photographer that only takes spectacular pictures. It would be unthinkable of me to hoard the files or discard pictures that are less than technically perfect. No professional is willing to compete with that. What I offer to them is actually better even though my pictures are not as good as those of an experienced professional simply because I'm willing to actually release them.
Apple's managed to get more than fifty thousand apps through the process and onto the store. Nobody's going to write stories about the ones that went smoothly.
Apple is stifling innovation and you think it's fine so long as they've let through 50,000 tetris clones (okay an exaggeration, but it makes my point). Gotta love it. Think different indeed. Think with our marketing blinkers on. To top it off I bet I get modded troll by Apple zealots.
This is EXACTLY why we need OPEN architectures. No developer should have to go through putting together an application only to have it rejected arbitrarily. The same people who support DRM and copyright supposedly to compensate the creator are happy to deny a developer ANY money for their effort at their whim. Hypocrites!
Well I won't be buying an iPhone no matter how "cool" they look or what nifty features they have let alone gambling my time and effort developing for one in the hope that some junior Apple cronie rubber stamps it.
Personal backups which you are describing are NOT the same as long term data archiving which is what I was talking about. Long term data archiving is for situations where you do not need access to the data often but you MUST be able to access the data when the time comes in the future. A perfect example would be the need to archive all of the evidence from a computer crime case
That is a different situation to what most slashdotters will encounter. Most people reading slashdot will be much more interested in personal backups than computer forensics. Hard drives can work in a forensic situation too if the rules of evidence allow and if there is a well known and trusted way of transfering the data without tampering with it. Checksums on the files for example would work if stored on different media under the control of different people.
I would bet that most of the discs in that 10% figure were never written correctly in the first place.
Yeah, there's the hallmark of a reliable storage medium. How often does your hard disk fail to write 10% of the data?
You can't blame the media when the data written to the disc was not verified after it was written.
I think I just prooved that I can.
I work at a company that focuses on forensic as well as data recovery software for optical media and I have come across numerous examples where the data was just not written correctly in the first place or at all.
I won't be taking your advice then. There's a conflict of interest. In any case you're just making the case AGAINST optical media.
Also, you would be very suprised what a different reader is able to do for the readablility of a disc, especially a good old reader compared to ANY CD/DVD drive being sold today. I have personally seen and heard of many, many situations where a corruped CD (dye problems, scratches, etc) cannot be read in many different CD/DVD drives but if it is put in an old Plextor 12-10-32 drive it can be read NO PROBLEM. I work in this field, from your comment I take it you do not, so don't speak about that which you do not know.
So what you're saying is that you need a reader that's no longer manufactured and is obsolete to get reliable reading? Am I suppose to be impressed? That's horrible. What happens in another 5 years when the number of working Plextors has dwindled?
Please don't resort to arguments of your credibility because you happen to work in the field. For someone that does, you've said some extremely FOOLISH things.
Go back to your beer now or else you might sober up and become angry that you made yourself look like an uninformed jackass.
No danger. I don't drink.
Seriously, you're willing to believe that a DVD or CD will last 1000 years based on marketing and pseudoscience and I'm the one that looks like an uninformed jackass? Please don't make me laugh.
I think I've wasted enough time talking to someone who believes in magical digital media that lasts 1000 years. You want to know what media lasts 1000 years? Stone tablets. Even that requires proper storage. (Paper and parchment will also last but it will degrade even if stored properly)
Are you serious? You believe hard drives qualify to use for archival storage? Short term okay, but definitely not long term, especially with SATA drives which have extremely high failure rates.
Short term is good enough. Just copy the drive over every few years.
Have you ever had a HD with the only copy of important data have a hardware failure such as the controller board or a motor going out?
Not for many years. I have multiple copies of anything important. I wouldn't trust your data to a single DVD or CD either.
If not then I can tell you that it will cost a huge amount of money to send it to a company for recovery,
Never gone to a data recovery company. Never plan to. If the disk craps out, the data's gone. Better have another copy handy.
compare that to putting an optical disc in a drive that suffers a hardware failure, with the optical media you just have to put the disc into another drive and boom you have access to the data again.
What rubbish! If your disk is damaged, a better or different reader only has a small chance of saving it.
For long term storage however I think it is hard to beat optical media.
10% failure every few years is hardly what I'd call a good long term storage option. I think you've got blinders on.
Robotic systems exist for archiving large amounts of data so that is not a problem and blu-ray discs are coming down in price and hold pretty large amounts of data, the reading mechanism is kept separate
Just how many affordable (cheaper than multiple hard disk) robotic DVD storage systems have you seen?
compared to a HD which has many internal parts which can fail so it is more reliable long term
Copy to multiple hard disks. Refresh the disks every few years.
and there exists media with claims of 1000 year life which is untouchable for HD's
There are also claims of Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy and Elvis being abducted by aliens. Don't believe all the claims you read, especially when someone can profit by lying to you.
and there exists media with claims of 1000 year life which is untouchable for HD's.
I have a bridge to sell you. You get to collect the revenue in 1000 years.
For real data archival no one even considers hard drives, that would be insane,
You need to copy the hard disks across every few years.
optical media however is a real alternative along with tape, but I think optical media is superior.
Two observations: 1) You've been lucky. Others have not faired as well (and some of those others have tried very hard to only buy quality media)
2) CDs and even DVDs are too small.
Who wants to copy 222 DVDs to fill up just one terabyte drive? Who's got the time to sit there shuffling disks? I store backups on external hard disks. They cost roughly double what you'd spend on quality media and while it takes hours to copy across a terabyte of data you don't have to babysit it.
Video only still belongs on DVD because most players read the discs. Other data simply doesn't. The only exception is a temporary low cost solution for mailing or passing a few GB to a friend. If you don't expect to get the media back it'd be too expensive just giving them USB thumb drives so CD/DVD fills this niche. Other than those two uses I can't think of a good use for DVD/CD. Certainly not archival storage.
I used the wrong terminology. I meant differential. I am a Windows user and I only use robocopy or windows explorer. (I imagine I'd use rsync if I were using unix)
You're right in terms of backups relying on previous increment resulting in total failure.
This approach also doesn't sufficiently mitigate against a virus doing damage but lurking undiscovered for some time since hooking up the backup drive exposes it to any virus. However only write once media will mitigate and I've found CDs and DVDs way too unreliable.
If you want to protect against a house fire or theft 3 drives is the minimum.
1st drive is your main drive, which you want to back up
2nd drive is your primary on-site backup. Preferably only switched on for backups, which are performed regularly (at least weekly)
3rd drive is your offsite backup. It's there in case your first 2 drives are corrupted, stolen or lost. It is your backup of last resort and lives at a trusted relative's house that lives more than 10 minutes away but no more than about an hour. Backup to this drive every month or two.
Remember also that your exposure is limited to however often you back up your drives.
Some more tips, if your data is really important and you have the money to do it:
NEVER overwrite existing data on a backup drive if you can help it. Incremental backups are best. Once you fill a backup drive, stow it and get a new one. Only do incremental backups to the drive. Anything you overwrite may be overwritten with something that has become corrupted.
If you want to get more secure, rotate your offsite backup drive. You'll end up with multiple offsite archive drives.
Once a drive is more than 5 years old, copy it to a new drive. Do not dispose of or overwrite the old one. Hold onto it until it dies.
How much risk is acceptable? Is the Air Force suggesting that space exloration should be 0% risk, or less?
Less than 0% risk? How does that work? Does the crew have to mate and reproduce or something so you have more astronauts than you started with after a launch?
Slashdot Mirror
From TFA:
"It may be so sensitive that even a tiny amount of sound caused by electromagnetic radiation is enough to drive them out."
Surely if it's sound based, they're reacting to the sound produced by the equipment, not some sort of weird sonic biproduct of light.
Listen pal, I know you hippies live in fantasy world of employee unions and benefits, but how do you expect to get your brand new unlocked IPhone for only a few bucks, loaded with tons of free-to-download applications if they didn't have that kind of labor practice?
Some of us would gladly give that up if employees were paid decently. It's called human compassion. I know it's a novel concept for some but geeks aren't immune to it.
If you were wondering who won, it was the British.
Try getting your widget-whatsit on the shelf at Walmart.
Why would I care about that? I can place an add in the paper and sell my widget whatsit without getting it approved?
Just use the exhaust fans from the servers to power it! Instant perpetual motion!
Right now! No thief will ever get your data if you destroy it right now!
Oh you wanted to use it in the meantime. Well that's different...
1) The cheapest 100 pack of single layer DVD+R's from a decent brand I can find on newegg.com is:
Data 4.7GB 16X DVD+R 100 pack is $17.99 / 470GB = 3.8 cents / GB
2) The cheapest 500GB hard drive I could find is: ...and how many of those cheap as chips discs are going to misburn? What's the warranty period on those?
Samsun HD502HI 500GB SATA 300 is $49.99 / 500GB = 9.9 cents / GB
Also you're better off looking at 1TB if you want best price per GB on the drive.
You look like an uninformed jackass because you are one
Yeah you write bogus comparisons and believe marketing nonsense with zero evidence and I'm the one that's the jackass. If you believe that there's nothing I can do or say thats worse than what you're doing to yourself.
You really aren't worth the time refuting. None of your arguments hold up.
For starters we could enforce the existing laws. Caught talking on your cellphone twice, hand over your license. That has the same problem as the get-tough license revocations for DUI. A scofflaw who drives while talking on the phone or while drunk (or talking on the phone while drunk) is the same kind of scofflaw who will drive without a license after it's been revoked and drive without insurance after the policy is canceled. Pass all the laws you want, they'll be happy to break them all!
That's what jails are for.
Not an Apple zealot here...
then
Btw... just released my first iPhone app this past weekend
At best I'd call that a conflict of interest. At worst, contradictory.
Took only 7 days to get approved by Apple.
7 days too long if you ask me. I don't know about you but I don't like having a 3rd party decide what code I can and can't release, and when.
We can't even teach people to signal turns and lane changes reliably. Teaching cell phone safety to the public is about as likely to happen as someone winning the lottery jackpot 37 times in a row by finding discarded tickets in the street.
Yeah that's the way. We CAN'T teach people. Let's give up and rely on technology to keep us safe. Then wonder why people are killed on the roads. We need to do better with training not be fatalistic about it.
FAA regulations prohibit talking about non-flying related things between crew members during takeoff and landing approaches, and a violation of this reg was blamed for causing a crash near Buffalo earlier this year.
That's because those regulations are often ignored. The pilot who crashed also had falsified his record which included other serious incidents. It wasn't just a case of some great pilot who got chatty and killed everyone.
What, you are unable to pull over and shut the car off before calling 911?!
Do you think that a jammer can be so targetted as to only work in a car while it is running? They'd be jamming on the highways.
All the existing laws are "feel good" laws for sanctimonious pricks. All the studies that have been published show that it isn't the act of holding a phone up to your ear that causes a driver to be distracted, it is simply talking on the phone that matters. But all of the laws give free passes to anyone with a handsfree phone. That's arguably worse than holding the phone to your ear - if you do that, at least the other drivers have a chance of noticing that you are on the phone and giving you a wide berth, handsfree makes you look like all the other drivers even though you are not as engaged with the road as they are.
All the existing studies are biased with the aim of creating or tightening laws and increasing associated fines. I'm yet to see a study that takes distracted drivers, teaches them to cope with the distraction and compares their performance before and after. I don't accept that anyone on the phone in their car is a danger. I do think those who've had no practice and training are a danger.
One difference is that he is talking on the radio ABOUT what he is doing. His brain isn't focused on flirting with the ATC.
Another difference is that the ATC knows when to shut the hell up and let the pilot do his job if something goes wrong, just like someone in the passenger seat would. But someone on the other end of the phone may not even know he is talking to a driver.
ATC often can't tell what your immediate situation is until you report it. It's the pilot's job to prioritise the communication. Also transgressions do take place with ATC and pilots talking about things they shouldn't. (There have also been accidents where it's a contributing factor, but I still say a pilot has a much better chance of focusing on what's necessary than the average motorist).
Part of the training needs to be learning when to ignore the conversation and focus on what's happening BEFORE you've managed to get into dire straights. Another part needs to be when to hang up and switch off your phone. Spending an hour on the phone flirting with someone is not appropriate but why does it have to either be that or a total ban. Where's the scope to apply common sense and logic?
Lets say you block cell phone usage. Does your technology exclude calls to emergency services? If not that's going to lead to deaths. Does your technology differentiate between the driver and a passenger? (I don't know how you'd even try to do that).
For starters we could enforce the existing laws. Caught talking on your cellphone twice, hand over your license.
Better would be to teach drivers to better cope with distractions including cell phone usage. If a pilot be required to be communicating on a radio while they land and take off - in a fast moving vehicle that falls out of the sky if not kept within parameters, at the edge of those parameters - I think drivers can be taught to drive safely on a cell phone. Not just left to their own devices to work out how, but taught. Where are the studies on how effective it is to teach drivers to drive while distracted by cell phones and other modern devices?
So you'd rather lock up the picture and let no one see it, and you want sympathy? If you don't want to donate it, how about you sell the picture to the publicist? How much are you going to make ON AVERAGE on a picture if you retain the rights? Not how much will your best most popular picture sell for? THAT would be a reasonable price.
I'm an amateur photographer and stuff like this is exactly why I'm not willing to go Pro. I've shot a few weddings for friends and family. (Mentioning this infuriates most professionals and/or draws insults) The friends/fmaily get the RAW files. They get the pictures YOU would discard in order to protect your reputation as a photographer that only takes spectacular pictures. It would be unthinkable of me to hoard the files or discard pictures that are less than technically perfect. No professional is willing to compete with that. What I offer to them is actually better even though my pictures are not as good as those of an experienced professional simply because I'm willing to actually release them.
Apple's managed to get more than fifty thousand apps through the process and onto the store. Nobody's going to write stories about the ones that went smoothly.
Apple is stifling innovation and you think it's fine so long as they've let through 50,000 tetris clones (okay an exaggeration, but it makes my point). Gotta love it. Think different indeed. Think with our marketing blinkers on. To top it off I bet I get modded troll by Apple zealots.
This is EXACTLY why we need OPEN architectures. No developer should have to go through putting together an application only to have it rejected arbitrarily. The same people who support DRM and copyright supposedly to compensate the creator are happy to deny a developer ANY money for their effort at their whim. Hypocrites!
Well I won't be buying an iPhone no matter how "cool" they look or what nifty features they have let alone gambling my time and effort developing for one in the hope that some junior Apple cronie rubber stamps it.
Personal backups which you are describing are NOT the same as long term data archiving which is what I was talking about. Long term data archiving is for situations where you do not need access to the data often but you MUST be able to access the data when the time comes in the future. A perfect example would be the need to archive all of the evidence from a computer crime case
That is a different situation to what most slashdotters will encounter. Most people reading slashdot will be much more interested in personal backups than computer forensics. Hard drives can work in a forensic situation too if the rules of evidence allow and if there is a well known and trusted way of transfering the data without tampering with it. Checksums on the files for example would work if stored on different media under the control of different people.
I would bet that most of the discs in that 10% figure were never written correctly in the first place.
Yeah, there's the hallmark of a reliable storage medium. How often does your hard disk fail to write 10% of the data?
You can't blame the media when the data written to the disc was not verified after it was written.
I think I just prooved that I can.
I work at a company that focuses on forensic as well as data recovery software for optical media and I have come across numerous examples where the data was just not written correctly in the first place or at all.
I won't be taking your advice then. There's a conflict of interest. In any case you're just making the case AGAINST optical media.
Also, you would be very suprised what a different reader is able to do for the readablility of a disc, especially a good old reader compared to ANY CD/DVD drive being sold today. I have personally seen and heard of many, many situations where a corruped CD (dye problems, scratches, etc) cannot be read in many different CD/DVD drives but if it is put in an old Plextor 12-10-32 drive it can be read NO PROBLEM. I work in this field, from your comment I take it you do not, so don't speak about that which you do not know.
So what you're saying is that you need a reader that's no longer manufactured and is obsolete to get reliable reading? Am I suppose to be impressed? That's horrible. What happens in another 5 years when the number of working Plextors has dwindled?
Please don't resort to arguments of your credibility because you happen to work in the field. For someone that does, you've said some extremely FOOLISH things.
Go back to your beer now or else you might sober up and become angry that you made yourself look like an uninformed jackass.
No danger. I don't drink.
Seriously, you're willing to believe that a DVD or CD will last 1000 years based on marketing and pseudoscience and I'm the one that looks like an uninformed jackass? Please don't make me laugh.
I think I've wasted enough time talking to someone who believes in magical digital media that lasts 1000 years. You want to know what media lasts 1000 years? Stone tablets. Even that requires proper storage. (Paper and parchment will also last but it will degrade even if stored properly)
Are you serious? You believe hard drives qualify to use for archival storage? Short term okay, but definitely not long term, especially with SATA drives which have extremely high failure rates.
Short term is good enough. Just copy the drive over every few years.
Have you ever had a HD with the only copy of important data have a hardware failure such as the controller board or a motor going out?
Not for many years. I have multiple copies of anything important. I wouldn't trust your data to a single DVD or CD either.
If not then I can tell you that it will cost a huge amount of money to send it to a company for recovery,
Never gone to a data recovery company. Never plan to. If the disk craps out, the data's gone. Better have another copy handy.
compare that to putting an optical disc in a drive that suffers a hardware failure, with the optical media you just have to put the disc into another drive and boom you have access to the data again.
What rubbish! If your disk is damaged, a better or different reader only has a small chance of saving it.
For long term storage however I think it is hard to beat optical media.
10% failure every few years is hardly what I'd call a good long term storage option. I think you've got blinders on.
Robotic systems exist for archiving large amounts of data so that is not a problem and blu-ray discs are coming down in price and hold pretty large amounts of data, the reading mechanism is kept separate
Just how many affordable (cheaper than multiple hard disk) robotic DVD storage systems have you seen?
compared to a HD which has many internal parts which can fail so it is more reliable long term
Copy to multiple hard disks. Refresh the disks every few years.
and there exists media with claims of 1000 year life which is untouchable for HD's
There are also claims of Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy and Elvis being abducted by aliens. Don't believe all the claims you read, especially when someone can profit by lying to you.
and there exists media with claims of 1000 year life which is untouchable for HD's.
I have a bridge to sell you. You get to collect the revenue in 1000 years.
For real data archival no one even considers hard drives, that would be insane,
You need to copy the hard disks across every few years.
optical media however is a real alternative along with tape, but I think optical media is superior.
You're smoking too much pot.
Two observations:
1) You've been lucky. Others have not faired as well (and some of those others have tried very hard to only buy quality media)
2) CDs and even DVDs are too small.
Who wants to copy 222 DVDs to fill up just one terabyte drive? Who's got the time to sit there shuffling disks? I store backups on external hard disks. They cost roughly double what you'd spend on quality media and while it takes hours to copy across a terabyte of data you don't have to babysit it.
Video only still belongs on DVD because most players read the discs. Other data simply doesn't. The only exception is a temporary low cost solution for mailing or passing a few GB to a friend. If you don't expect to get the media back it'd be too expensive just giving them USB thumb drives so CD/DVD fills this niche. Other than those two uses I can't think of a good use for DVD/CD. Certainly not archival storage.
I used the wrong terminology. I meant differential. I am a Windows user and I only use robocopy or windows explorer. (I imagine I'd use rsync if I were using unix)
You're right in terms of backups relying on previous increment resulting in total failure.
This approach also doesn't sufficiently mitigate against a virus doing damage but lurking undiscovered for some time since hooking up the backup drive exposes it to any virus. However only write once media will mitigate and I've found CDs and DVDs way too unreliable.
If you want to protect against a house fire or theft 3 drives is the minimum.
1st drive is your main drive, which you want to back up
2nd drive is your primary on-site backup. Preferably only switched on for backups, which are performed regularly (at least weekly)
3rd drive is your offsite backup. It's there in case your first 2 drives are corrupted, stolen or lost. It is your backup of last resort and lives at a trusted relative's house that lives more than 10 minutes away but no more than about an hour. Backup to this drive every month or two.
Remember also that your exposure is limited to however often you back up your drives.
Some more tips, if your data is really important and you have the money to do it:
NEVER overwrite existing data on a backup drive if you can help it. Incremental backups are best. Once you fill a backup drive, stow it and get a new one. Only do incremental backups to the drive. Anything you overwrite may be overwritten with something that has become corrupted.
If you want to get more secure, rotate your offsite backup drive. You'll end up with multiple offsite archive drives.
Once a drive is more than 5 years old, copy it to a new drive. Do not dispose of or overwrite the old one. Hold onto it until it dies.
Free as in speech.
Free as in beer.
Free as in free to blow the shit out of something.
How much risk is acceptable? Is the Air Force suggesting that space exloration should be 0% risk, or less?
Less than 0% risk? How does that work? Does the crew have to mate and reproduce or something so you have more astronauts than you started with after a launch?
Who would you trust more to protect YOUR data?
Myself!
Like you have any financial documents... What do you keep track of your allowance?
I wish the Australian tax office shared your attitude.