That old drive you’re putting in storage, you can technically just destroy it. Keeping it acts as a 4th (aka “crazy”) level of redundancy.

You have copied all its data to your new machine. That data is now getting replicated on the 3 newest drives according to the guide.

Thanks for your comment though, I’m happy people are still reading this 3 years later!

but i have been thinking about this matter recently (i haven’t researched it that much yet, though) and i find an issue with your strategy:

– ultimately, you keep the last copy of the data (if i read correctly) on one drive, stored away, safely.

This is what bothers me. That drive will still be prone to failure. Even if you store it away inside a nuclear protected bunker, eventually, 5, 10, 20 years from now, the circuitry may be damaged, the motor may have rusted, some part of the ultra sensitive magnetic surface may have oxidated. Magnetic information fades away.

It doesn’t seem to be a permanent way to keep family photos and things of the sort. In 20 years, even a cheap, bad quality print, if stored away with minimum care, can be viewed. And more so with printed paper works.

I don’t really think it is possible to store away electronic information. it probably needs to be always “live” and being transferred to newer, and newer drives, as they come along.

nice text, though :)

Every month or so I will boot Ghost or TrueImage from a cd and duplicate the system drive. And then, I’ll just filecopy using windows explorer, all the digital photos and mp3’s, and journal, and other important data onto the backup drive too.

I use USB hard drives for this purpose. And somewhat less often I’ll back those up once in a while.. It really doesn’t take much time at all. And for added safety, you can take one of the drives offsite.

It is important to practice restoring your data, especially the system drive. Always verify your drive images and backups.

*** Really, if your a home user, all you need is 2 external usb drives, and ghost or acronis trueimage.. For the cost of less than $150 you will not have major headaches. Do it once a month, or whenever you make huge changes to your system or when you get a ton of new invaluable data, like vacation pictures or something and got some free time. No complicated raid stuff, or scheduling, or swapping drives or worrying about online services.

I have a 60gb macbook which contains everything I hold dear. I mirror it (?correct term) once or twice a week to an identical sized external firewire drive. I’ve then got a bootable perfect copy of my laptop drive that’s never more than a few days out of date.

I continuously backup my important files in the background to both an offsite destination (in the the sky for all I know, but I’ve checked it’s safe!) and to a windows computer in my house which is pretty much always turned on. Crashplan does this very well. I’ve never tried Mozy. It’s encrypted before it leaves my computer which is important for me – I’ve quite security conscious and use file vault on my macbook. My important unique data (documents/unique music/photos) only amounts to about 20gb. Most of the music can always be got again. Much of my unique data doesn’t change from day to day so internet bandwidth isn’t an issue for the offsite uploading.

Combine these two methods and it’s pretty close to bullet proof and quick to recover as well. My laptop drive died only two weeks after initiating this very simple routine. All I had to do was hook up the bootable firewire drive, download the files which were new or changed in the four days since I made the image and I was up and running again in a time measured in minutes rather than hours. I had to then get a new drive for the macbook and transfer the image onto it to get mobile again.

I haven’t really thought how this would scale up. I don’t think it would be as good for people who have huge changes in data from day to day.

If you work with raw video footage every day you’re going to have to think about your strategy a bit more, but the same concepts will still apply.

We’ve hit a rough patch right now because digital video is still relatively new, and drive sizes haven’t caught up yet. As soon as video stabilizes into its “ultimate” archival format (like music in flac format for example, think uncompressed 1080p…), your data collection will only grow linearly, whereas drive sizes will continue to grow exponentially. This will take some time, but it will happen.

In the meantime it’s important to identify what you really want to keep forever. Personally I choose not to keep torrented shows or movies. They will always be out there to download, there’s no point hoarding them. If you stick with backing up documents, photos and music you’ll be ok.

Don’t let an irrational need to back *everything* up keep you from backing up the things you hold most dear.