One of my favorite tips in that report is how saving your files on a back up hard drive can save you countless hours and many headaches if your hard drive crashes and you lose all your files.

Having said that, sooner or later, you should consider an offsite backup *in addition to* your local backup. This is cheaper than a safe deposit box, and you’re much more likely to keep good backups since you don’t have to bring your hard drive home to do a backup. There are a lot of cheap and easy options for this that are mentioned above (such as Jungle Disk, etc.), and you could use a free tool such as SyncBack to handle scheduling and encryption.

Here’s a few more things that I’ve learned about home backups:

0. Don’t rely on a remote backup only. The “closer” a backup is to your computer, the more likely it is to be restorable. Remote backups should be used only if your local backup doesn’t work.
1. Make all backups (both local and remote) as automatic as possible. The more human intervention that your process requires, the less likely you are to actually execute the process.
2. Backing up to optical media (like CD’s and DVD’s) is not only labor-intensive, it’s more expensive than a hard disk in the long run. Also, hard disks failures are easier to detect than DVD block failures. If your hard disk fails, you’ll know the next time you do a backup. If a DVD starts to degrade, you won’t know that you’re data’s gone until you need it.
3. Always, always, always encrypt your backup before you store it remotely. Don’t trust your remote storage provider to encrypt or obfuscate it for you. SyncBack has encryption functionality built-in, and a lot of other free and inexpensive programs can also do this.
4. I don’t personally encrypt my local backup, because I want restorations to be as easy as possible. Some encryption schemes require a “private key”, and if that’s only stored on your computer, and you lose that drive, __you__ __are__ __screwed__.
5. If you do lose any data (baby pictures, old tax documents, etc.), then it can probably be restored by some companies that specialize in this sort of thing. Please keep in mind, however, that this service is pretty expensive. It’s much cheaper to come up with a decent backup process like Trent.
6. To save money, backup all of your data locally (movies, music, pictures, docs, etc.), but only backup your highly-important data remotely. Backing up 1 GB remotely is much more expensive than backing it up locally on a disk. Personally, I backup around 120 GB of data locally (*everything*, including lots of mp3’s and avi’s) and 7 GB remotely (docs, images, code, and other stuff I can’t live without).

Keep up the good work!

Tom Purl

I spent a month looking at all backup options available, both online and offline, and Mozy ended up being the best (both in price and data safety).

Don’t trust optical media or hard drives. They’ll fail, sooner or later.

******If you are not going to TEST YOUR BACKUPS on a regular basis, do not waste your time making them.*******

This has been a problem at work a number of times, and people still don’t seem to understand how necessary this step can be. If you spend 2 weeks gathering and processing your data, it is useless if you don’t take it out and make sure it is in good shape every so often.

Regarding the comments about LA, I now have the incentive I needed to spend the extra money on a fireproof safe.

One important caveat, be sure to “energize” your flash or hard-drive every so often. What I mean by that is to actually connect it to power via your PC. This is why data corrupts or the drive loses it’s contents. Memory is just electronic circuitry and does, from time to time, require electricity to pass through those circuits in order to keep those little electrons charged properly. So I would recommend using flash drives and making a trip to the safe deposit box once or twice a year with your laptop to plug the flash drive in and refresh the contents. If a file isn’t accessed for a long time, it will fade away. Good luck!

My reaction is do not encrypt. If it is safe in a safe deposit box there is no need to encrypt it. Some years from now, the encryption program might not be around any more, or if something really bad happens, then you might not be around to tell the password to someone and then all the memories are lost.

If you leave one backup in your house, you might want to encrypt parts of that one. Lets say you are afraid that burglars will find your financial statements, then it is good to encrypt that part of the hard drive, but if you leave the same files on your computer and the burglars take both, then you encrypting your backup makes no sense.

I would go for the following, active files on the computer, and one primary backup, maybe a secondary backup in a safe, then burning DVD’s and giving them to relatives at regular intervals.

As for me with 3 computers, no central backup big enough to store all my files, I have a backup solution, but it is in no way foolproof. I would need to have a distributed version control system.

As all these other folks have said, hard disks are not 100% reliable. Having only a single copy of this stuff is a Bad Idea unless you’re going to pony up the cash for a technical solution protects you from the failure of a single drive. (Best of all, a failing disk may begin to silently corrupt its contents, but still appear to work–at least until you come across one of the files that have been mangled.)

For most people, it would be more cost effective (and safer) to make use of an online backup service, in which case your files will be safely stored on fault-tolerant hardware.

Of course, you could also archived to DVD (or, if you can afford the premium price, Blue-ray). The advantage here is that individual discs are relatively cheap and can be mailed to relatives, giving you off-site backups in case some really bad happens. Just keep in mind that you get what you pay for (cheap discs can be flaky) and that DVDs/BRDs don’t last forever, either, so you’d need to make a fresh copy of everything every few years.

Don’t forget to talk to other relatives, especially older ones. They may well have photo’s and information not in your mind. I was able to find video footage of my Great Grandfathers funeral, complete with footage of a lot of now deceased relatives AND my parents and my self in 1960.

Two other tricks to add.

1 try and name the images with as much information as possible in case they get separated from the text file. Most modern OSes will allow very long file names.

2 Look into using IPTC data to make your comments. Basically it’s a hidden “layer” in your image that allows you to put keywords, photographer info etc. It’s pretty much a standard on the professional level and more than likely will be there for some time to come. There’s even freeware out there to access it.

You have a great thing going here: thanks so much for putting forth the effort for the rest of us!

My sister and I were just talking about this today. She is trying to gather pictures and stories and is having some success. But most of the women of the family are “too busy” to write down what happened to them. One uncle has written two biographies and only mentions his wife 4 times and only one of his three children in them.

She found a genealogy in the back of an old photo album of our mom’s, it included two sets of twins that had died that we knew nothing about. They had been the eldest and the family didn’t talk about them. She is also trying to label the photo’s while someone still knows who they are.

They have recorded some stories using a digital camera with recording features but I am suggesting taking a digital voice recorder to the next family reunion and just leaving it on as they tell stories and get them transcribed.

She intended to send a copy to all her kids when it is done but I told her it is better to get what you have out there in case something happens.

I also happened to run across this today too on the exact same topic.

Keep the source files as simple as possible: text and jpg, Sure, go ahead and make a nice little compilation piece in word or something for everyone but save it as pdf too.

Optical storage has the shortest lifespan right now but is easy to send to family via mail, send them new copies every year for Christmas and that will be good.

Flash drives have the lifespan right now, up to 100 years, they said that about CD/DVD but they are not archive quality at all, they are only good for a few years. I have floppies that have lasted longer. all this means to me that you need to use more then one technology to save stuff. And migrate often. It also means that paper and film still have a place.

Pick a safe deposit box at ground level (not basement), as high as you can reach.

Because vaults aren’t water-tight, and neither is your safe deposit box.

The reason I’m happy with it as a backup service is that it’s completely, totally automated. Once you set it up, it backs everything up in the background. The initial backup takes a long time (at least a few days) but after that it only backs up new or changed files. There is a huge peace-of-mind factor involved in having backups automated.

And, it’s cheaper than buying an external hard drive and needing to constantly update your backups every time you add something new.