3-2-1 Rule. You might like to try and explain the rule to him.

NO FILE EXISTS, if there aren’t:
At least 3 copies
On at least 2 different mediums
And at least 1 of those is off-site.

I’ve got 3 and 2 down and most of my data is also oned.

I have a laptop, an iMac, 2 USB drives (with sufficient ventilation), a ReadyNAS Duo (appauling piece of kit really, but cheap, one of the drives failed and it promptly replicated the new, empty drive onto my full drive, when I stuck it in! Luckily, I didn’t trust it and had made sure all of the data was copied to one of my other machines!).

I also replicate most of the data in the cloud. Music and RAW images being the exception. I did use Carbonite for a while, but it didn’t work well with Apple Apeture, every time I added a new photo to the collection, it reset the backup count to 90GB!

Now I PIE (Pre-Internet-Encrypt) my files and store them on Skydrive, GDrive and Dropbox.

Spindles and Meteorites. Data is increasingly transient the closer it is to “one spindle” or the path of and “one rock”. Increase the spindle count (HD,Tape or medium) and put them so far apart you’d need a cosmic event/flood/fire/bankruptcy so large data is the last of your worries.

I have the original data on drive 0, a ‘daily’ backup on drive 1, a weekly backup on drive 2 and (all 110GB of it) a skydrive copy for ‘offsite’

Local copy on 5 1/4 hard drive plus one on JustCloud. My nice new fibre-to-the-cabinet has allowed me to stick nearly 1Tb up there in a couple of days It’s the first time EVER that I’ve felt smug about my data backup! I just hope my direct debit never misses a payment………

Steve, with Carbonite, I had around 200GB in my cloud backup, but the default way Apeture works (one big database) means that every time a photo is added to the collection, Carbonite noticed the file change and wanted to upload the whole kit-and-kaboodle again. That is why I stopped using it and switched to using normal cloud services, like Skydrive et al.

Given the lower limits of the Cloud “Drive” services, I am converting my RAWs to high quality jpegs and storing those online, along with the 5 local copies of the raw files.

You can never have enough backups, that said; you store 5 local copies of your raw files David? I’m not sure what you are shooting and I suspect you have far less data than a professional user as obviously more backups are a good thing! But RAW files from my 5DmkII are around 30MB each, if I was to store 5 copies of these I’d be looking at 150MB for each set of copies for just a single image, and on a regular day of wedding/event shooting 800 to 1200 images, that’d be 120GB to 180GB of data for the 5 copies. I’m not sure what local storage you use, but as I might do an event 4-5 times a month, I doubt very many people who don’t work at a data centre have access to 8-10TB for a year’s backups… Plus JPEG conversions, working retouching 16-bit TIFFs (which file sizes can be vast), Lightroom catalogues etc. Personally I backup to a Synology NAS (with different brands of HD populating the RAID for safety), as well as a Mac and PC, plus irreplaceable files in the cloud pre-encrypted on Dropbox, DVDs for archive backups, although keeping a separate set accessible on a NAS.

I have “local” backup to an external USB HDD, which I rotate with a “off site” HDD, and I have over 320GB of that data backed up to the cloud. I’m hoping that will cover most scenarios!

Maybe Google meant for that to happen. “Hey, don’t store your life on those flaky desktop drives, store it in on Google Drive, and use a Chromebook too. We’ll search it for you ”

After going the mousetrap route a long time ago, and having the drive fail on me, I now only use external hard-drive enclosures for my backup drives. They take any 3.5″ drive, most have quick release mechanisms and I’ve had no failures yet (touch wood).

@David Wright – I wonder if something like Crashplan would be able to backup your Aperture database? I know when I upload large files to Crashplan+ online, it only uploads the changes made to the file and not the whole thing.

From their FAQ: CrashPlan uses advanced data de-duplication and block level incremental backup. At a very basic level, this means that once a file is backed up, only subsequent changes are sent to your backup destination.

@David Wright, have you tried backblaze? That works fine with my aperture library.

I use an external time capsule for local backups, along with an external drive set up to be a vault in aperture and backblaze as an offsite backup for if things go really wrong. I have around 600GB backed up to the cloud now through backblaze and it only costs around £5 a month. I’m very impressed with the service, mainly down to the ease of use and how cost effective it is.

@Paul B – I’m more or less the same, except I’ve always used an enclosure. Used to use an icybox when had IDE drives. Now use Sun Bright eSATA and USB.
@Andrew – I’m not sure any of the external enclosure caddies come with a fan. Mostly because the power kit is all external, and they generally have enough internal space for some airflow, as an example my enclosure comes with a mini heat sink.

As a question: does PcPro review external enclosures? They are one of the tools of a system recovery expert yet… rarely get any mention, anywhere.

@khellan Naturally, and I’ve had a SpinRite story read out on the show!

After my last epic fail at protecting my data onto DVD’s, I invested in an iomega cloud storage NAS Box with 2 2gb green drives.
Touch wood, I haven’t had any problems since.

Katsu999 I use outlook.com email and it distributes email and calendars to my Android device without any issues. Also use outlook client on one machine for a laugh and I’ve created an email loop for one address whereby everything goes through gmail and is auto archived before being forwarded onwards.

@Chris J – I’m having a look at Backblaze now.