I’ve been having frequent enough issues with my various computers that backing up regularly (which I’ve done for years) isn’t as simple as it used to be. Now that I’m running both a desktop and a laptop machine (at least, when the desktop gets back from the repair shop), plus everyone else in the household’s machines, my old backup strategy fell flat.
My old strategy was each machine on the network using the same backup software (Cobian Backup 9) to create differential backup files — only saving the files that changed since the last complete backup was taken — and storing them on a secondary hard drive on my desktop machine.
As you can tell, there’s an easily defined point of failure there: if my machine isn’t online or there’s an issue with the secondary hard drive, the backups will fail to run. So we’ve been over a week now without the usual backups being taken.
My short-term strategy is just to worry, but my longer-term strategy is to buy something like this, a 2Tb network drive with RAID 1 (disk mirroring). That still leaves a point of failure in the process, but with RAID, I can hope that unless both drives in the unit fail at the same time, there’s only a small chance of serious data loss.
Update: That just figures . . . it’s now marked as unavailable, but the 1Tb NAS is still in stock.
Update, the second: Here’s an up-to-date article on backup strategies.
