my 2 cents on some technology advice

So i work for a call center and i just wanted to share with you guys the importance of having a BACKUP of all important information of your computer. Not only that whenever you buy a "backup" drive no matter brand you have to know how to use it. The definition for a backup is: Having the same information in more than one physical location. So when you move your information from your computer to the "backup" drive and then erase it from your computer, you no longer have a "backup".

I get calls like this all day long from customer that lost their data because they thought they put it in a safe "backup" place. Truth is anything electronic and with moving parts will fail and there is no way of knowing when its going to fail. Hope it helps guys.

Dam i guess everyone on this forum is aware of this stuff lol.

I have about a Terabyte of photos and videos that I have taken myself. That includes a lot of raw files too which with my camera is about 40MB per photo so it adds up and makes it impractical to back up to places like Carbonite (Uploading 1 TB data isn't fun).

I have all the data on a separate drive on my computer so if I ever need to reformat the OS drive, it won't hurt the data there. I also have a WD 2 TB external drive that I back everything into (music, movies, personal photos, docs, etc.) . I keep that one in my apartment in a fireproof safe out of reach, but use it once a week to back up my photos. If someone comes and steals my computer and doesn't find where I have my safe, 99.9% of my stuff is backed up. I have a seagate 1 TB travel drive that's almost full to the brim (been too lazy to get another 2 tb drive) and on that one, I only keep the personal stuff (no music, movies, etc) and once a month or so bring it from an offsite location to back my stuff up in case my apartment catches on fire, etc.

In case my apartment gets hi by a hurricane, and the offsite location 15 miles away gets hit by the same hurricane, I still have another old Maxtor 1 TB drive that I keep in a city further to the west. It doesn't have everything, but I update it once a year or so and at least childhood pictures and such is safe.

Being paranoid, I'm also starting to backup at least the jpgs of family photos and other pictures I can't do without on google drive. They give like 25 GB's of free online storage which is plenty of space. Dropbox gives 2 GBs also. Flickr has 1 TB of free storage but it's such a pain to use as a backup source so I gave up there.

Nothing even ever secured completely

Not losing irreplaceable pictures is a bigger concern to me than security. I could encrypt the drives but then I'd risk not getting into it myself later.

I agree with IamAman. In my person experience encryption increases the chances of something as simple as forgetting your password up to making it easier to get data corruption. But i would definatly say you got your backup covered lol

Funny this thread is bumped because I just got another Western Digital Passport (ultra this time) 2 TB drive. This would be my remote backup so I turned on encryption on it...it's actually not a true encryption and more like the hardware locking the data partition of the drive but it's enough to keep a snooping person from getting the data unless they're a security expert. With my local backup that's hidden, I didn't turn on the lock.

Note imaman i said it increases the chances meaning that this does not apply to everyone for example like i said it increases the chances of you forgetting your password. Believe me i've gotten calls on my work with customers calling in because they cant remember their password. Some customer even expect us to have a way around the password or keep a database of all customers passwords but would would make the data security more vulnerable.

And also like you said there are different types of encryption. Your method "hardware encryption is much more simpler, its just sort of a lock that wont let you access the data until you open the lock and True encryption well it basically does that it encrypts it by using sophisticated mathematical functions. So with all this being said the first post still applies keep your data backed up lol

It's all about cloud-based storage nowadays. It can be more expensive but if your data is very important to you then I'm sure it will be worth every penny.

I been using crashplan+family plan for years and love it definitely worth it if you value your data it currently keeps backups of my macbook pro, windows 8.1 pc, & Surface 3 pro as well as my parents pc's. I'm also running ubuntu server with 10 drivers. The backup drives are on a Datoptic SPM394 raid controller (raid 5) 4 x 3TB red drivers with backups of everything I mention so there's a local backup and a cloud backup. I also run Time Machine backup via Netatalk protocol for my macbook pro on the same server along with a few services on the server (plex server, sickbeard, sabnzb github to name a few) the rest of the drives are in JBOD. I also keep all my documents sync to dropbox/google drive and music to Google music. So yeah there's a backup for the backups for the backups 0_o