Quote:
Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward
DG, here's my two cents worth (for what it matters).
How do the Big Boys do it?
Multilevel and off-site Back ups. The bank I first programmed for shipped a copy all their files off-site every night. And weekly backups. And quarterly backups. and Yearly backups...
So you need at least two external drives. One at the house, one somewhere else (safety deposit box?) Before you laugh at that, think how much you've spent on data. And that's not even including the priceless stuff (priceless because you can't recreate it at any cost.)
Rotate the off-site and on-site every three months. Sync 'em up with your current data and put one back off-site.
And let's face it, we individuals who are not programmers will load 99% of our data as static files, never changing. Pictures, music files, e-books, they don't change. So every three months is good enough. Keep a USB drive handy for anything you get that you can't risk losing and keep it handy with the computer. Clean it out after every three month swap.
If you do that, hard drive crashes will become just a nuisance....
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The
REALLY big guys (US Government) have a concept called Contingency Of Operations (COOP) where they replicate the entire data center at a remote location. This must be, by regulation, more than 50 miles away, and is usually thousands of miles. E.g. Hawaii and Alaska. These are fully capable of carrying the entire load for both regions, and if either region suffers a catastrophic failure, the whole system automatically fails over to the remaining one.
A little out of scope for my home PC, but completely doable if I have multiple computers on my home network. I have my desktop system, my wife's notebook, and my netbook. Most of my data is on all three, and just in case the house goes away I have Carbonite.