![]() My drives are large enough to hold several backups apiece, so the weekly backups give me week-by-week snapshots for a couple of month's time. ![]() When the monthly backups return from offsite I verify all of the files by reading them to ensure their checksums haven't changed. I use a utility to checksum all of the files on the drive. The most recent monthly backup is stored offsite. I have two other external hard drives that I alternate for monthly full backups. I have two external hard drives that I alternate for weekly full backups. I have two flash drives that I alternate for daily incremental backups. ![]() Multiple copies protects you from a failure, and regular checking ensures that failures don't go unnoticed before a subsequent failure makes it impossible for you to recover. Regularly check the copies to ensure they're OK. To safeguard your data, you need to do two things: ![]() Full backups are simpler and more reliable, but are usually much slower and require much more storage capacity than if you include incremental and/or differential backups.Īny media can fail. To help others provide reasonable solutions, tell us what type of data you need to back up, how critical it would be if you lost it, how much data (in gigabytes) needs to be backed up, and estimates of what percentage of the data changes daily and weekly. I'm sure that others will share different backup strategies, but if you don't feel the need to do a full backup at least every month or two, you must not have much data that's really Most people's needs aren't as critical as businesses, and I rotate 3 external hard drives, doing full backups weekly and partial backups of selected folders every couple of days. It was actually a little more complex than this, but you should get the idea. I used to perform daily backups of a moderate size network, cycling through 30 backup tapes and removing one each month, placing it into a backup archive and then adding a new unused tape to the daily 30. if your computer's hard drive dies at an inopportune time. If you use only a single backup drive you put yourself into the position of possibly losing up to the most recent 6 months worth of data, documents, email, etc. ![]() The only way that works is if you have at least a dozen hard drives and perform a backup every two weeks. So what is the next best way to backup on a long term basis? I've heard hard drives start to lose data after not being turned on for a while? I would like to archive in an external drive and put it away for at least 6 months at a time. I don't want to pay annual fees for online backup. ![]()
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