3 ms·

> Keep big backups locally. housefires.

tripzilch 14y ago
Echoing this, because it happened to me. And in that case I was very happy I backed up my most important things to some sort of "cloud" (a combination of GMail, creative portfolio stuff on a few webservers, projects I had sent to friends and a couple of those filelocker sites). Additionally, SD Cards turn out to be some the most resilient data storage media I've personally witnessed. Probably helped it was encased in a camera, which was kaput, but the photos on it were fine, not even data-bent. And a year later I found in a box of my damaged CDs some more treasures on a couple of really old DVD backups that actually still worked :D (I never bothered to really unpack the boxes of partially blackened and warped CDs--there's no need in the age of MP3, and after a while you've really seen enough boxes of sooty crap smelling like burnt plastic) My basic lesson from this is: spread your data and risks around. Though, none of that stuff was encrypted. Just the stuff I kept online was passworded and do friends count as a two-factor auth? :-)
- MiguelHudnandez 14y ago
  Sorry to hear about your house fire. I wonder, would it be feasible to bury a small portable hard drive in the garden or something, and have a conduit running up near the house? It'd be cute to have a USB port on the wall which you plug your laptop into when you want to make a physical backup. No thief (or house fire) is going to trace down a USB lead that's poking out from the ground or wall. It's taking Apple's "Time Capsule" branding to the extreme literal sense.
  - tripzilch 14y ago
    Hahaha! No idea if it'd be feasible (my apt is at 1st floor anyway, I have no garden), but it'd be cool as hell to load your backups onto a USB cable that goes underground :-) As far as USB plugs sticking out of a wall are concerned, have you heard about the "USB dead drops"? http://images.google.com/images?q=usb+dead+drop http://images.google.com/images?q=usb+dead+drop
MiguelHudnandez 14y ago
I guess I should've added a "tl;dr" or mentioned putting your backup drive in a safe earlier in the post. And I suppose not all safes are fireproof.

Echoing this, because it happened to me. And in that case I was very happy I backed up my most important things to some sort of "cloud" (a combination of GMail, creative portfolio stuff on a few webservers, projects I had sent to friends and a couple of those filelocker sites). Additionally, SD Cards turn out to be some the most resilient data storage media I've personally witnessed. Probably helped it was encased in a camera, which was kaput, but the photos on it were fine, not even data-bent. And a year later I found in a box of my damaged CDs some more treasures on a couple of really old DVD backups that actually still worked :D (I never bothered to really unpack the boxes of partially blackened and warped CDs--there's no need in the age of MP3, and after a while you've really seen enough boxes of sooty crap smelling like burnt plastic) My basic lesson from this is: spread your data and risks around. Though, none of that stuff was encrypted. Just the stuff I kept online was passworded and do friends count as a two-factor auth? :-)

MiguelHudnandez 14y ago
Sorry to hear about your house fire. I wonder, would it be feasible to bury a small portable hard drive in the garden or something, and have a conduit running up near the house? It'd be cute to have a USB port on the wall which you plug your laptop into when you want to make a physical backup. No thief (or house fire) is going to trace down a USB lead that's poking out from the ground or wall. It's taking Apple's "Time Capsule" branding to the extreme literal sense.
- tripzilch 14y ago
  Hahaha! No idea if it'd be feasible (my apt is at 1st floor anyway, I have no garden), but it'd be cool as hell to load your backups onto a USB cable that goes underground :-) As far as USB plugs sticking out of a wall are concerned, have you heard about the "USB dead drops"? http://images.google.com/images?q=usb+dead+drop http://images.google.com/images?q=usb+dead+drop

MiguelHudnandez 14y ago

I guess I should've added a "tl;dr" or mentioned putting your backup drive in a safe earlier in the post. And I suppose not all safes are fireproof.