Originally Posted By: Camu Mahubah
Okay so I need a backup strategy. Can you point me in the right direction? Do I need to buy one of those external harddrive things for my new laptop? As it is with no ports I can't backup this one.
Personally, I like to keep 3 copies of everything: the "working" copy on my machine, a backup on an external USB or Firewire drive, and a copy "in the cloud" using something like Amazon's S3 service, or Microsoft's LiveDrive, or any one of the myriad online backup storage solutions. This third, "in the cloud" solution mitigates against floods or fires or children, all of which are capable of destroying copies 1 and 2 simultaneously.
I use Google Docs and Google Calendar (both free) for home and business administration, Flickr ($25/ year for unlimited storage) and Picasa ($20/ year for 20GB) to store my full resolution photos, and Blip.tv (free) to house my full resolution family videos; and treat my own computer as the backup. I mirror every system in the house to an external drive, which could restore a bootable system if need be, and anything of real importance to me goes to Amazon S3 ($0.15 per GB per month; my bill is usually ~$3/ month).
Hard drives and online storage are cheap. Losing my $3000 Macbook Pro would suck, but losing photos or video or anything else of my clients or my family would be the real disaster. I know a lot of the other "computer people" on this forum will understand when I say that at least a few times a year I have to deal with someone whose system crashed, or got a virus, or something wrong got clicked and now they're without the ONLY COPY of their kids graduation.
No wonder many are calling this the "digital dark age". I wonder how much of all this information we have will be usable in 50 years.