Building a Personal Backup Strategy - The Basics

This will be the first in a series of posts that I have been putting together in my head for a long time. Many things have prompted me to think about what makes a good backup strategy for a home user; professional situations I have been in, catastrophes we have all witnessed, and my own data losses. Most recently, I was listening to MacBreak Tech episode 20 which was a discussion about backup. The hosts did a thorough review of everything that makes a good backup, but I did have a problem when they were done... I was reminded again that our important data is not completely safe! In order to completely think through the protection of my own family's data, I figured I could make the discussion public to consolidate my thoughts, give people ideas of how to do backup well, and solicit opinions from other knowledgeable folks.

First of all, we need to describe what constitutes a good backup. In the digital world, a backup is not just a copy of your data. A copy can be misplaced, found to be unusable, or can fail at the same time as your live data. A backup is an available, verified copy of your data that is stored on reliable media in a geographically separate location. Let's take those one at a time:

1. Data has to be available when you need it or else it is useless to you. The extra copy of your data shipped off halfway across the world to your cousin in Timbuktu who has no Internet access is not really a backup.
   
2. Data may not arrive perfectly at the backup destination, whether it be an external hard drive or another server across the Internet. The five extra copies of your data that you made without verifying that your software was working properly are not really a backup.
   
3. Not all media is suitable for long term storage. The extra copy of your data stored on 3.5" floppy disk (which have a high failure rate) is not really a backup.
   
4. Data needs to be stored in more than one location before it can be considered backed up. If your house burns down, the extra copy of your data that you made on an external drive that is also at the bottom of the rubble was not really a backup.
   

Now that we understand the basics, we can take a deeper dive and discuss some solutions I consider viable for our own family needs. The context for our discussion will be a family with a growing collection of digital photos, music, and movies, but with a limited budget. So, if you are also wondering about what you should be doing to produce a true backup of your digital data, and like us, you don't have a bottomless pit of money with which to do it, check back for the rest of the posts in this series.