<p>I backed up everything to a WD mybook till it died. Now I need to find a new way to do things moving forward. I wish i had a back up of the back up because my PC died almost at the same time and I wound up losing everything.</p>
<p>After backing up data I safely remove the USB drives and turn them off. I don’t want the virus scanner shorten the disk life.</p>
<p>SanDisk just announced 256 GB SSDs the size of a postage stamp with unreal performance numbers (like 460 mb/sec read) and I imagine that these will be very pricey. But these SSDs should be far more reliable than conventional HDDs. I could imagine these devices could be used for backup purposes once prices get down to where they could sell on mass markets.</p>
<p>I wish the industry has some small independent double/triple disk device (similar to RAID).</p>
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It’s not just you - many large corporations have a two or even three datacenter backup process where the data is automatically backed up to at least 1 or 2 other datacenters in different geographic locations. </p>
<p>Picture a disaster like the World Trade Center destruction. In addition to offices those buildings also had datacenters in them and companies who didn’t have their data backed up offsite had real issues as a result of it (along with the other obvious issues they had with the disaster).</p>
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Actually it does. I configured a bunch of low end servers at work (HP DL320) with dual hard disks in a Raid 1 mirrored configuration. It’s an inexpensive way to provide some level of protection against a drive failure. I did this mostly for convenience. For larger more important servers they’re configured with Raid 5 with hot spares.</p>
<p>If you’re going to buy a desktop it’s a reasonable idea to make sure the desktop can handle having a second disk configured as a mirror. Disk drives, especially internal ones, are cheap enough that it’s worth considering.</p>
<p>It doesn’t resolve the issue of offsite backup though to protect against fire, theft, etc. that might get all of the onsite storage (including DVDs).</p>
<p>There’s always Iron Mountain but it’s geared to commercial backup (I’m sure that they charge accordingly). I’m currently happy with having one backup offsite but you guys are starting to make me feel a bit paranoid. I don’t really know where I would put a second backup that’s done regularly and I don’t want to move the backup drive to minimize the potential for damage.</p>