Where do you Back Up your Data

Pleease do not read if you are of a Nervous Disposition. It is not my intention to cause any distress or anxiety

I know they say you should always back up your data on a regular basis but I always seemed too busy.
About 2 years ago my Computer died and I lost everything
It was heartbreaking like a family Pet dying,
It wasnt just the Porn ( although that was bad enough) but I lost a lot of family history I had collected over the years to put into a
Family Tree, stuff which could never be replaced. My list of Contacts addresses favourite places went as well. I could go on but you know what I mean, I probable dont even know what stuff I did actually lose

Since then I then started to back my Data up regularly using a mixture of DVDs and external drives, using one to back up the other. and so on to cover all bases

However in the last 2 weeks one of my friends has had a House Fire which not only destroyed his Computer but also fried his back up discs, another friend has just found out that a whole heap of data DVDs are no longer readable in any Computer.

These events have made me think and wondered how other people back up thier data.I know that you can back up "off site" but Im not sure how secure these are and of course they cost. In any event Im not sure I want to put my Personal stuff in the hands of a third party

I would be interested to know how others Back Up

Once again I do not want to cause anyone to worry but just wondered what others do

Cheers

I use a 500gb ex harddrive for all of my music,films,games and i store my important documents on 2-3 2gb usb sticks & dvd back ups and i also have print outs of the really important word documents.
I do use msn skydrive but not for anything important.

Offsite backup is cool if u don't use a fireproof safe, mainly the kind of things businesses use over VPN or Leased line.

apart from the norm which would be external or a raid setup allot of companies as well as ISP's offer large online storage for these kind of things.

I know Virgin have just started a service where they offer backup online.

it's not everyday you expect your house to set ablaze so it's just unfortunate this time round to be at such a loss.

Chimpy Wrote:I use a 500gb ex hard drive for all of my music, films and games.

My sister used to use a 1 terrabyte external for all of her music, films, games e.t.c. But then all of a sudden one day it just wouldn't turn on. Needless to say she lost all her data.

BladeWave Wrote:My sister used to use a 1 terrabyte external for all of her music, films, games e.t.c. But then all of a sudden one day it just wouldn't turn on. Needless to say she lost all her data.

You can buy third party cases, meaning that when this happens you don't need to lose your data. Simply take the hard drive out of the original case, stick it in a third party casing and you should be able to access the data.

All of the videos I upload on here originate from DVDr's.I just don't trust magnetism! My PC decided to make 'My Pictures' disappear last year! An engineer couldn't recover it so I lost about 2 1/2 months of family photos as I back up to DVD every 3 months.That included my younger Nieces 1st birthday! I now backup photo files weekly onto CDr's,they are smaller and fill up quicker,and do not delete them from my camera's SD card until they are backed up.

Dreamlander-wish I didn't have 400+ DVDr's of the 900 channels though!

Dreamlander Wrote:All of the videos I upload on here originate from DVDr's.I just don't trust magnetism! My PC decided to make 'My Pictures' disappear last year! An engineer couldn't recover it so I lost about 2 1/2 months of family photos as I back up to DVD every 3 months.That included my younger Nieces 1st birthday! I now backup photo files weekly onto CDr's,they are smaller and fill up quicker,and do not delete them from my camera's SD card until they are backed up.

Dreamlander-wish I didn't have 400+ DVDr's of the 900 channels though!

I feel for you. It is very distressing when you lose things which have great sentimental value as they cant be replaced

WOW 400+DVD`s Respect to you, hope you have a good labelling/index system.You must suffer for your Art.

Backup? Hmmmm
Distributed networking across the house, and the main desktop unit is running RAID5. Some of the data is also archived to CD (not DVD as I don't trust the dye stabilities yet for medium to long term storage) and the odd bit stored online on spare space on a web host
I really ought to centralize my storage really and convert one of the units into a file server but just haven't got the time to spend several weeks trawling through everything

Right now DVDs, or important files are duplicated across hard drives and PC. In total I have about 2.25TB of HDD space on my main PC and not enough of it is safely backed up. So the plan is sometime this year to shift it onto a NAS with RAID 5 and some 4.5TB(3TB) of storage. That's unless BD-Rs come down in price and are reliable cause I'm really sick of DVDs now, they're far too small.

Thanks for the replies guys
Although not a complete computer Novice I think I might need to consult a Knowledge base about some terms...Lol..
Cheers for your time