It may be helpful. Consider online backups for your important digital documents

[Claudio L.]

My method (not so good I think): I backup my phones to my PC every couple of months (I use SD cards on the phones in case phone dies, never the phone's flash memory, and I make sure new photos are saved to the SD card). I leave the copy on my PC every time, so I have up to 6 copies of the same file on the PC (pictures taken in January get copied in the Feb backup folder, then the April folder, etc., every time I do a full backup and don't erase the previous one). The PC has an SSD drive.
Every time a phone gets changed to a new one, I put a new SD card and the old one goes in my box of memories. I have lots of SD cards from digital cameras, camcorders and phones, I never delete anything.
I also have a NAS with 2 hard drives mirrored, everytime I backup the phone/camcorder I also copy onto the NAS, but this time I only leave one copy of each file (well, 2 because it's mirrored).
Then I also backup the PC up to Amazon Glacier, which is really inexpensive until you need to restore something. I pay less than $2 a month for almost 300 GB, but if I lose my PC AND my phones AND my NAS AND my box of SD cards, it will cost me $500 to restore everything.

My biggest weakness is that the NAS, PC and original SD cards are all in the same room, so fire would force me to recover from the online source at a great expense. But if my house catches on fire, I'm going to lose a whole lot more than $500.
I should mention (not really part of my digital backup strategy but I could say it is given my system's weakness) that I have one fire extinguisher in the kitchen, another one in the garage, and two more, one on each car, so if a fire starts while I'm there, I can stop it before it becomes bad.


PS: I had a few USB drives die in my hands, they aren't bad but not indestructible. I also had SD cards that become unreadable all of a sudden.