My backup plan...

Why more backup?... is the question that my wife/friends always ask me when I mention the keyword "backup"... 

Since I lost several of my pictures after the sudden death of my "warehouse" disk back in 2001, I decided to always keep a second copy of my files. About two years ago my DELL computer died and I was able to recover about 99% of my files thanks to the double copy I had... but all the pictures got corrupted metadata and I had to manually update their info on a picture-by-picture basis. I haven't finished yet. Since then, I decided to change my backup strategy.

If you look around, you will find cases of people who lost +8000 of their pictures, or, as one friend, who reinstalled his /home partition in top of is *only copy of tons of pictures*. If you value your data, you should have backup. And a second copy on an external hardrive is never enough says Scott in this blog post.

Anyways... I wanted to share here my backup plan. It may inspire someone with new ideas or simply serve as a reminder for me in the future, in case I need to change something on it.

I have two off-site services working (Dropbox & CrashPlan) and two computers in the loop: my work computer and my personal Macbook Pro.

• On Dropbox (I have a paid 100Gb subscription) I keep all my work files so they are in sync among my devices. Also Dropbox holds my iPhone and iPad pictures with the Camera Upload feature.
• The same feature uploads to Dropbox the pictures I take with my Nikon D3000.
• Crashplan runs only on my personal computer, but since all my work files and pictures are in Dropbox, they are backed up off-site as well.
• At home I have a WD MyBook Live 2Tb harddrive that holds the local backup of my personal computer. (My wife's computer is daily backed up there too.) I use Time Machine, so there is an hourly backup of my computer when I am at home.
• The WD MyBook Live 2Tb harddrive also holds the family pictures and videos so the whole family can access it within our network. Because of that, this disk is backed up daily on a second hardisk (WD My Passport 2Tb) connected on the same network using the USB port my router provides.
• At work I have a WD My Book Essentials 2Tb hardrive that holds the local backup of my work computer. This backup is created each 30minutes using Back In Time free backup tool (clearly I use the 'smart remove' feature to have "exponential" deletion of backups).

As such, I have a nice network of backups around me. I have 2 copies of my work files locally (at home) and two more copies at work (almost remote backup). The personal files are copied 3 times locally (at home), and all the files are copied (without deletion and versioning) to Crashplan servers.

It took a a lot of time and money, but the peace of mind is priceless. Obliviously I did not buy all the components at once. I started with the  WD My Book Essentials 2Tb only. Then I got the WD MyBook Live 2Tb and recently the WD My Passport 2Tb for mirroring. The more layers I have, the better for me.

Obviously my system is not perfect, but works for me. Now I can recover any file any time I need.

...And believe it or not, it happens that you delete files without noticing!