Home Backup Process
Over the years, I’ve had an evolving process for backing up things that are important to me. Not unlike many others, I started off creating backups on CD or DVD media, with the presumption that I could archive data (e.g., documents, photos, software) permanently this way. We now know, of course, that optical media is nowhere near permanent, with a life expectancy of 5-20 years, depending on type. I later relied on encrypted volumes in a second internal hard drive, mirrored with an external hard drive. This is certainly an improvement but also not optimal.
How should you back up data? Well, you should use the 3-2-1 concept:
3: Create one primary backup and two copies of your data.
2: Save your backups to two different types of media.
1: Keep at least one backup file offsite.
My previous process, which is much better than nothing, created two copies of my data, but it was all stored locally, leaving it suscepital to loss in the event of theft or a disaster, such as a house fire.
So I bought a NAS (network-attached server) from Synology (cost: $300) and added two 6TB hard drives to it (cost: $200 each). Then, I set up encrypted volumes to drop files into, which replicates them across the second drive, and started searching for off-site storage (cloud storage) services. I really liked C2 Storage, which is offered by Synology, but I don’t particularly like the way of retrieving files if there’s a data loss, and the end goal here is to have a backup process that can be leveraged in the event something happens to me and my wife (or executor) needs to recover documents and irreplaceable photos. It needs to be a process that she, or a caretake of my children (if something happens to both of us) can easily manage. Since C2 doesn’t permit file retrieval other than back to a NAS device, I looked at Backblaze, which offers an FTP-based retrieval process. In the end, I pay around $3.50 per month, which is more than reasonable.
All in, total investment was about $700 and my data is backed up in a way that is sound in the near term, but also easily manageable for whomever needs to retrieve data for my wife or my kids after I’m gone.
