Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

There is inconvenience with restoring backups,
there is complete disaster (data annihilation?) in not having any.

Bayou

Excellent rant.

Mr. SONY Loc: LI, NY

Well, the safe which is sitting on concrete blocks is under a fire sprinkler head.

DirtFarmer Loc: Escaped from the NYC area, back to MA

So what happens when an earthquake cuts off the water and starts a fire?

‘When it comes to backup you can’t be too paranoid’

Mr. SONY Loc: LI, NY

Well, I've experienced an earthquake on LI many years ago while out riding our motorcycles
just south of Grumman's property in Calverton, NY.
It was nothing.

Some people have become so silly over backups.
Yes, the 'cloud' is good for backups it's not the only backup strategy.
It's useless also if someone doesn't want to use it.
It's hard enough to get these people to use a backup drive.
The people who come up with all these silly arguments over backing up have no idea about dealing with people who
are not anywhere near as knowledgeable as they are.
You know how many people don't backup their pictures, etc. off their phone.
You know how many people have no backups of any of their data in their computers.
These people have no idea what the cloud is or have given any thought about backing up anything.

I'm not advising people who understand backups, clouds, etc.
Not too long ago some guy was either here or some other photo site begging for help over lost pictures and videos.
So, went wrong?
Lightening? nope. Water? nope. Earthquake? na na. A plane fall onto his home? nope.
He mistakenly he overwrote his one and only backup drive.
Such a simple mistake where it wouldn't matter if only, he read my mind and made addition backups.
My goal is to inform, teach, explain why they need more than one backup drive.
From his description about how angry his wife was about his mistake and how distraught he was he must have been crying at his screen.
Heart breaking and so simple to avoid if only he had two or better yet three copies of his data.
Copy and paste.
Screw up one drive, no worries you got two more.
Yes, at one time I serviced computers, pc, BTOS, Unix and then third party through the company I worked for.
Third party at times was awful.
You're dealing with people who are not like the showoffs here.
They're just regular people who don't fully understand their computers.
To have to stand in front these people and explain they just lost all their pictures, etc because their computer tech support
said to them, 'no problem. put the rescue cd in the drive. Turn off your computer and then turn it back on and the cd will run and reformat
your drive and reinstall the OS and all the extra programs.
Oops! bye, bye pictures.
I advise from a different perspective, the smart ones ever had to deal with.

Until you've stood in some one's home explaining to them about their loss of data with tears in their eyes, you won't understand.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

So if you’re going to style yourself as a teacher, teach correctly. And especially if an individual is not knowledgable, be best thing he can do is listen to a pro, not another amateur who may or may not know what he’s doing. If you’re ill, do you ask your neighbor what’s wrong or see a doctor?

You’ve spent 4 posts and multiple paragraphs giving advice. Here’s correct, simple advice in a couple of rules:

1) You need 3 copies of your data - your working copy, an on-site backup and an off-site disaster recovery copy (if the other 2 fail).

2) the best off-site copy is in a MAJOR cloud provider such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft or Apple. If you have very poor (slow) internet, pick a service that you can send your data with a HD and they will send you a HD I’d you ever need to restore.
Lacking that, store one at a different location and update it regularly, but this is a poor substitute for the cloud.

3) if you don’t use SSDs, use enterprise class drives for everything, not the cheap $49 that’s on sale at Costco.

4) choose a cloud service that uses versioning (you can return to an earlier version of your file(s) if they become corrupted, infected with malware or accidentally deleted. And understand you backup SW or cloud’s deletion policy - if you delete the working copy, is it immediately deleted in the backup or cloud?

Simple.

Mr. SONY Loc: LI, NY

Yes that simple.

Mr. SONY Loc: LI, NY

Yes that simple.

Mr. SONY Loc: LI, NY

Yes that simple.

Mr. SONY Loc: LI, NY

Yes that simple.

Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States