This is such an important topic that I’m including it in this book. Malware, virii, and ransomware can all infect our computers and wipe out our digital lives in an instant, and those high-falutin’ fancy RAID solutions can’t save you from these threats. But there is a relatively inexpensive and resilient backup scheme I’ve been using for years and it has saved me from every kind of failure you can imagine. There's a very good chance that your needs are pretty close to mine, which is why I'm sharing these here.
Before you can design any kind of a system that is going to protect your data, it makes sense to identify the risks you're trying to protect your data from. Here is my list of threats I'm concerned about:
That's it. The other "soft" criteria is that I should be able to recover from a hardware failure in about a day.
The solution I use is cheaper than any commercially available backup solution out there. I purchased 3 sets of USB 3.0 external drives, and use them in the following ways:
1) The first set of external disks are permanently attached to my desktop, and act as my main working drives.
2) The second set is my backup set, and is always powered OFF unless I’m making my nightly incremental backups (that way if there’s a computer virus it can’t infect a drive.) If there’s a fire and I have to grab something quick, I grab these drives and my laptop and scram. I'll lose no more than a day’s work this way.
3) The third set acts as my off-site backups. One of the drives is kept by a friend, and once a week it is swapped out for set 2 above. If the unthinkable happens (fire/theft/both), the most I’ve lost is a week’s worth of data. (And even that's not a problem - see step 4).
4) For projects where even losing a day's worth of work is unacceptable, I've started using dropbox as my working drive, and include it in my nightly backup schemes. Dropbox has a feature where you can go back to a month’s worth of prior versions should the ransomware kick in.
Over the years I've had every type of hardware failure happen to me - one time happening in the middle of a backup! - and have never lost any data using the above scheme. It has served me well and doesn’t represent a huge capital outlay.
(Scholarly note: Online backups to the cloud won't work for me, since my data set is so large it would take me months to recover all the data by downloading.)