Backup and Recovery

Dave is using Western Digital's backup software with his WD External drive. How can he be sure he's backing up all his data? Leo says that he can't since WD uses a protocol that backs up all files into one big master file (or what Leo calls a big ball of stuff).

Brian was running backup with Carbonite and his hard drive crashed during the backup. Leo says that's bad luck and is likely a coincidence. Fortunately, Brian had a local backup. Leo says that a good backup strategy is what is known as a 3-2-1 backup. Three copies on two different formats, with one being off-site. Backing up and then deleting the original is not a backup. Redundancy is the key.

Argwin needs some long term archiving of his files. He's concerned that in 5-10 years, the medium that he stores his data on will be obsolete making that data unreadable. Zip drives are a perfect example. They still work, but they've become so outdated that they can't even connect to a computer anymore. Leo says that at the end of the day, hard copies of data will always work. The cloud is his friend here. It's relatively new though, and some services may not exist in 10 years. That's why Leo advises a shotgun approach.

Dom has 10 terabytes of movies and TV shows. Could he use Carbonite to back them up? Leo says that Carbonite backs up very slowly. 10TB would take years to upload, and Comcast would likely cut Dom off. It would be expensive to store all that in the cloud. That doesn't mean Dom shouldn't have an off site option. He can use several hard drives, back them up, and swap them out every week. Back up the drive, wrap it in bubble wrap, and then store it somewhere other than his house. Hard drives are really cheap.