Fredrick Loc: Former NYC, now San Francisco Bay Area

As a bit of background, today I use Acronis backup software to do incremental and full system backups on an external drive, and have my entire system backed up in the Cloud using Carbonite. Over the last six months or so I’ve read many posts on UHH regarding system backup schemes, some of which are very sophisticated, and appear to be somewhat expensive when you add in the cost of RAID systems and other hardware, etc. I can certainly understand the need for a sophisticated backup system for those Hoggers on this forum who have MANY terabytes of data. However, my entire system drive contains only about 300 GB of data, including my jpeg and RAW files. My system drive is a 1TB SSD.

So here’s where I’d like your insight and feedback!

I believe my exposure in losing my data is that I lose my system drive (in my laptop) and external backup drive to fire, theft, or electrical surge … and for some reason I can’t gain access to all my data in Carbonite, because they went out of business, or for whatever reason. I think this is all highly unlikely, but I’m also a believer in “Murphy’s Law.” Rather than having two or more external backup drives locally, and one backup drive off-site that gets backed up periodically … what if I simply just added another Cloud backup service? I would then have my system backed up locally to an external backup drive, and have all my data backed up in two different Cloud services.
I can’t see losing all my data (locally and on both Clouds) at the same time, and in this way I wouldn’t have to deal with purchasing and manually managing multiple external backup systems. Restoring all your data from the Cloud is not onerous if for example you have Backblaze dump all of your data onto a hard drive(s) and mail it to you. What do you think? What might I be missing here? I appreciate any and all feedback. Thanks.

etaoin Loc: Wichita, KS

Not a bad idea. Kinda depends on how critical that data is to you. Are they family keepsakes and cat pictures or do you run a business that depends on it which would spell financial ruin if lost? Not much in life is 100% guaranteed. Like the saying goes, "You pay your money, you take your chances."

Drbobcameraguy Loc: Eaton Ohio

Excellent thought but there is always a but lol. If the satellites goes down so does a large part of the internet also nuclear war will wipe out internet. Probably doesn't matter on the nuc part. lol

Curmudgeon Loc: SE Arizona

I believe that the number of redundant backup systems you employ is related to experience with lost data and your level of personal paranoia. In the old days we backed up to hard copy.Then I made two copies one I stored at home one at a remote location. As technology advanced and more and more of my life was stored on my computer(s). I now had two drives in my computer, a system drive and a backup drive. Oh yeah, talking about paranoia, I encrypted both drives with PGP. Good thing because that system got stolen, computer, monitor and printer. I lost my data but nobody could use it.

Again things changed MB hard drives became GB drives then TB drives. Everything, all my data, music, photos, movies is now on my computer. I sold, gave away or threw away all my hard copy. My personal files are encrypted the rest are not. I cannot afford to loose this data. That is why I have redundant backup systems. External hard drives, cloud storage, DVD storage and a safety deposit box. Paranoid, absolutely. Paranoid enough, only time will tell.

johngault007 Loc: Florida Panhandle

PGP was incredible until it was bought out and monetized. I still have my old keys

Fredrick Loc: Former NYC, now San Francisco Bay Area

Thanks for responding. Just curious, what was PGP?

Curmudgeon Loc: SE Arizona

It was an encryption program called Pretty Good Protection. In the early days it didn't have a back door. I don't remember for sure but I think it was 32 bit encryption which was state of the art. It really upset the Feds because they couldn't decipher it.

Fredrick Loc: Former NYC, now San Francisco Bay Area

Thanks.

johngault007 Loc: Florida Panhandle

I believe it was Pretty Good Privacy developed by Phil Zimmermann. The Feds were displeased because he designed it to without built in backdoors for intervention by adversaries or the government. It was symmetric key encryption where you shared a public key to associates to they could encrypt messages/data for specific people with a "public" key" and those individuals would then decrypt it with their "private" key, making it very secure for it's time.

Additionally, one could create content and then sign it with their private key to ensure the message or data was verified to be not tampered with. It's still around, and if I'm not mistaken, the freeware versions are available in other forms than the brand "Pretty Good Privacy".

NCMtnMan Loc: N. Fork New River, Ashe Co., NC

You may find that the two cloud services conflict with each other due to competing processes that load with your system boot to perform the scheduled backups. Also, after one has run, it may reset the archive bit on the files so that when the second one runs it will not see those files as requiring backup. It sounds like you are using Windows 7 or 10 for your operating system. If so, then you might want to consider the image backup that is available as part of the utilities. It will take a separate external drive dedicated to this purpose. What the backup does is create an actual image of your system in that moment in time. It backs up all files, setting etc so that if you were to experience a drive failure, need to move to a larger drive or were hit by ransomware or some other bad infection, you can recover your system back to that point in time without having to go through the laborious process of reinstalling, restoring and resetting system and program settings. You would then only have to restore anything added since the last image backup. I run one every other week as part of my backup routine that is combined with externals and cloud service.

wrangler5 Loc: Missouri

Anyone interested in the function and underlying math of public key cryptosystems can read the original paper prepared by Rivest, Shamir and Adelman when they were (I believe) grad students at MIT. https://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/Rsapaper.pdf I can't do the math, but I found it an interesting read when I first saw it, having ordered a copy from MIT after seeing a description in Scientific American.

It's not dated, but the latest date I saw when scanning the citations in the footnotes was 1977. And the opening line is "The era of 'electronic mail' may soon be upon us . . . " The authors went on to found RSA Security, which remains a player in the cyber security field.

johngault007 Loc: Florida Panhandle

Cloud services are just rented storage space and do not compete for any system resources. And I'm not sure how one or two different backup programs conflict with each other unless the user set each process to consume 100% of the systems allocated memory. I use a program called restic and have a cron job set at 3AM every day to a local backup drive and every Monday morning it runs one backup to the local drive and one weekly backup to cloud storage. Neither has an issue with the other and both take minimal resources.

Additionally, each backup (daily local && weekly cloud) maintain their own unique snapshots and that is used to determine which data has been changed. The "archive" bit is merely the backup program tracking changes within the snapshots so it is independent of one another.

Multiple cloud storage services just add additional cost, and personally I don't see the need for my work/personal data. I think Trix and some others have mentioned this multiple times, the major cloud storage providers have server farms spread out geographically and a single customers data is not necessarily located in one location. The "end of days" scenarios are fun to play out, but honestly, if we lost that much of our infrastructure, we have far greater things to worry about than saved data.

Blair Shaw Jr Loc: Dunnellon,Florida

Amen brother....I hear you loud & clear.

Fredrick Loc: Former NYC, now San Francisco Bay Area

The two cloud services wouldn’t conflict with each other. I’m currently doing an image backup with Acronis. Thanks for responding!

Fredrick Loc: Former NYC, now San Francisco Bay Area

Thanks for responding.