At least that is the goal… Data redundancy.  When your data is in one place and one place only, it’s just a matter of time before you have no data at all. If your data is just at one location, regardless of how many copies there may be, you are flirting with disaster in the form of fire, theft, or natural disaster. There is a rule called the 3-2-1 Rule for Backups: Have 3 copies of your data, stored on 2 different media, and keep 1 off-site.

Here is my suggestion:

Have primary data on two mirrored drives. This is to avoid any data loss should a hard drive crash. With mirrored drives (RAID 1), if one drive crashes the other continues as if nothing ever happened.

Have that data backed up to a local backup drive. (Forget Tape… that’s yesterday’s technology. See our article at [1] http://www.networkingdelaware.com/tape.html  ). This local backup is for several reasons…  hard drive controllers do go bad as do motherboards. If this causes the data on both mirrored drives to become corrupt, you will be ever so happy you had a local backup. Also, a local backup drive is the quickest, easiest and most convenient location from which to restore data… the more data you have to restore , the more important that you have it on a local backup source.

Finally, keep a copy somewhere else. If there is a fire, or flood, or tornado, or burglar, or vandal, or disgruntled employee or any of a hundred other reasons that everything just goes “poof”, your data is still available.  You can always buy a new computer but your data is always going to be many, many times more valuable then the equipment that houses it.

For these off-site backups I strongly suggest keeping your data in “The Cloud” using programs such as the very reasonably priced service called Backblaze ([2] http://www.backblaze.com/partner/af2651 ).  Several reasons come to mind: In keeping with our redundancy concept, most”Cloud Backup” vendors save your data at geographically separated co-locations… this protects them from data loss and gives you additional protection as well.  Data can be restored from almost anywhere an Internet connection is available.  Your data is encrypted using military grade encryption; when the backup is created, as the backup is being transmitted and as your data is being stored, your data is always safe from prying eyes. Most will mail you a hard-drive populated with your data in case a bare-metal recovery is required.

So Backup your data… Don’t be a statistic… like the 70% of businesses that go out of business when data loss occurs.

From down in the trenches…  I’m Tom