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It may be helpful. Consider online backups for your important digital documents
12-16-2018, 12:34 PM
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RE: It may be helpful. Consider online backups for your important digital documents
You allude to it but it is worth stating explicitly: a NAS is not a backup. (Because a NAS provides resilient access to the current version of any file. A backup provides access to previous versions.)

For most people, especially for photographs, I would suggest buying a cheap external USB hard drive (disk, not flash), copying all your photos onto it, and leaving it with a trusted relative. (They only have to put it in the basement or the attic - somewhere dry and relatively low humidity - in a plastic bag to keep the dust and insects out of the sockets.) Do this once a year. Don't re-use the previous year's drive. Just let them build up over time (because you may find that your 'master' copy gets corrupted without you realising and then you find you've dutifully backed-up the corrupt copy several times). Store all your previous photos plus all the new ones on each year's new drive. That way, if your house burns down or floods, at least you'll get most back.

One tip with photographs: go to a print shop and print the best ones from each event. Much easier to look through 10 or 20 good ones from a holiday rather than several hundred on disk where you never got around to weeding out the duplicates. Plus you can then write dates and names on the back.

On line services are great up to a point but remember that there is no significant contractual penalty on them if they lose your data. You'll get an "Ooops, sorry. We'll try not to lose it all again" message and that's it.

So, if you do use on-line only for your backups then use two different vendors and make sure they aren't both using Amazon (or whoever) behind the scenes.

Remember also with on-line services you really ought to be encrypting your backups which means you need to backup your encryption keys somehow as well. Otherwise you could lose those and lose access to your backups. It's a minefield!
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RE: It may be helpful. Consider online backups for your important digital documents - BruceH - 12-16-2018 12:34 PM



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