Quote:
Originally Posted by haertig
However, my personal anecdotal experience is that I have never had one single DVD go bad on me. Not commercially purchased software, not commercially purchased videos, and not any DVD that I have burned myself to any kind of blank media - from ultra cheap to high end.
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When I was young and foolish I lost a bunch of (irreplaceable) backups that way. I took multiple backups... but they were all on the same brand of DVD-R, stored in the same place, and they all went just as bad as each other.
Which is how I learned that...
Quote:
Originally Posted by haertig
Backups are your friend. Multiple ones. On different storage media. Stored at different locations. With at least one of those isolated from power and computer connections (totally unplugged) to protect against power surges, lightning strikes, etc.
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YES. They also must be automated, done in the background without your needing to do anything, with monitoring which screams its head off when anything goes even slightly wrong. (I have also automated a test restore of a bunch of stuff every month to make semi-sure *that* works, but honestly I've come to rely on good backups, so I "test" them more often than that by doing actual necessary restores!)
(The process of swapping out offsite backups doesn't need to be automated because, well, it's much rarer because you have to collect the offsite disk and physically unplug things and probably decrypt them so who cares if you have to run a couple of commands to say "hey, other offsite now" anyway?)
(Personally, I swear by bup and a bunch of scripting to back up homedirs almost constantly, almost everything daily, and everything including huge disk images dumped onto remote backups weekly, but honestly almost anything is better than the default of nothing that most people do.)