Coding is Hard

Backups

Posted 11 months ago.

On my home computers, I keep all important data on mirrored drives. By “important data,” I mean data that I’d rather not lose, but in reality I could start over without too much trouble. Still, I had been planning to implement something a bit more robust in the future.

As I see it, here are the problems with my current set up:

1. What if all the data on one of my drives gets erased, either maliciously (fairly unlikely), or by accident (oops! didn’t mean to put that space into rm -rf / baddir/)?
2. What if someone breaks into my home and steals everything?

Clearly, off-site backups of some sort are the next step that I need to take in data security. Small amounts of data can be stored in encrypted format on the web (in gmail, for example). However, that’s no solution for hundreds of gigabytes.

So the other day I went shopping at Newegg. There were several RAID’d enclosures available. The cheapest non-JBOD solution was a little under $200 without drives. Throwing in a pair of 1.5 Terabyte drives for mirroring would have more than doubled the cost. But I don’t need that sort of reliability for backups. If my backup drive fails, I can just buy another. So I wound up buying a cheap 1 Terabyte external drive copying all my data to that. I can store it at another location to provide some off-site protection. If I were paranoid, I’d buy two. But I think I’ll spend my time worrying about getting hit by a bus instead, thank you.