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Keeping what matters most

Posted by Rhys Lewis on 25 February 2010 | 0 Comments

The recent theft of a family’s home computers with all of their photographs and videos has highlighted the fact that secure backups are not just something that corporates need to think about. With over 10 years of video and photos, adding up to almost a Terabyte of data, I’ve been asking myself recently, “How do I back that all up securely?” Online storage companies start becoming uneconomic past around 20GB. Amazon charges US$1800/year to store 1TB in S3, and consumer storage like Mozy Home costs US$60/year, but my ISP will charge me $6.67 per GB to get it up there. Also, with a 20GB/month allowance it would take several years to upload it. Some people use flash drives for backup storage, but they are quite unreliable (expect them to last for 2 years), and cost at least $4 per GB, so it would take $4000 and a mountain of drives to back everything up. 200 DVDs would cost $125, but the logistics of creating and maintaining 200 discs is a bit beyond me. It’s also worth noting that the thieves stole the computers and the memory devices that were near them. The only realistic option is the good old hard drive. A 1TB external hard drive costs $175, it’s easy to use, and should last for at least three years. I opted for a techy roll-your-own application to backup to the USB hard drive, but there are a wide range of free products that will do the same job and don’t require any special skills. The critical thing is to make sure that your backup is not stored at the same location as your main copy, and that you have a way of confirming that the files on it have not been corrupted. So now I have a secure off-site backup sitting in my desk drawer at work, and this comes home for regular updates. My photos and videos are safe from everything except a volcano taking out the entire city. (Perhaps I need to buy another disc and send it to relatives overseas...)

Tags: data storage, industry analysis