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p.1 #7 · p.1 #7 · What's the best external portable hard drive? | |
You should definitely pursue local backup options as you are doing.
But, regardless of the hardware, you also want an off-site backup.
You can double your expenses by implementing this yourself poorly (i.e., your secondary back-up will only get populated whenever you are at the second site) or greatly increase your expenses even more and do it adequately (set up scripts etc. to sync the two).
Or, in this day and age, you can do it sensibly and economically by delegating it to professionals: i.e., use the cloud. In today's world, cloud-based backup makes financial, infrastructural and ergonomical sense. There is very little you, as an individual or even a company that does not specialize in backup, can do that comes close to what a (good) professional backup service can do in terms of ensuring your data is safe from physical and other hazards.
If have a tech-y side, you can just purchase space, and set up your own rsync scripts on cron. But for $50-150 a year, it makes sense to use a commercial service like CrashPlan. Not all such services are equal, not just in terms of the back-up security, but also in terms of their software. You want something that incorporates a sub-file or chunk-based synchronization. That way, if a backup session gets canceled or cut-off (because, e.g., you closed your laptop), it will just pick up where it left off within a file, instead of restarting the entire file again. Or worse, entire directory. Crucial for the big files that we deal with in photography. As a bonus: see if they offer version-control, with rollbacks going at least 3 months or several revisions.
Of course, if you are going to be spending time off-the-grid (or, same difference, most parts of the world, such as your in-law's place over thanksgiving, where the internet is slow-as-molasses), the cloud is less viable. But chances are your connection will be restored, and until then your portable local backup will fill in the gap.
Edited on Oct 15, 2014 at 09:01 AM · View previous versions
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