My buddy Jeff Handley tweeted this nugget of brilliance recently.
Every year I give the grandparents DVDs with all of our digital pictures from the year. To them it's a gift. To me it's off-site backup.
— Jeff Handley (@JeffHandley) December 18, 2011
Exactly. I've talked about backup strategies before. You just can't have too many backups. I have a NAS (Network Attached Storage...a fancy name for a black box in the closet we back up to) but I also have two external drives that are labeled A and B that I rotate between the safe at the bank.
My rules of thumb are:
- Use an imaging tool like Acronis True Image to create images of the machines you REALLY care about.
- You can also use the System Image tool built into Windows, but I prefer the additional options from Acronis.
- Encrypt your external drives.
- Backup files (and disk images) to two external drives
- Keep one external drive off-site
- Test your backups by practicing a restore. The rule of thumb is that backups ALWAYS succeed. It's restores that fail!
Jeff's idea is brilliant. Burn the extended family a nice DVD, perhaps with Picasa or Windows Live Photo Gallery and wrap it up as a gift!
Related Links
- A basic non-cloud-based personal backup strategy
- On Losing Data and a Family Backup Strategy
- BACKUP YOUR CRAP: Missing Operating System, Backups, Disk Images, Home Servers, BootRec, BootMgr, RebuildBCD, FixBoot and Problems, Plural
© 2011 Scott Hanselman. All rights reserved.
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