With the new year upon us, it is a good time to examine how you are protecting your “digital” assets. That being recordings, media, or whatever lives on your laptop, computer, iPad, phone or what have you. I think the article that really lays out how to effectively do this is one by backup service BackBlaze.
A 3-2-1 strategy means having at least three total copies of your data, two of which are local but on different mediums (read: devices), and at least one copy off-site. We’ll use “kitten.jpg” as an example for this scenario. Kitten.jpg lives on your computer at home; it was a picture that you took of your cat in 2012. That’s one copy of the data. You also have an external hard drive that you use for backing up your computer; if you’re on a Mac, you might be using it as a Time Machine drive (and Backblaze loves Time Machine). As part of its backup process, that external hard drive will back up kitten.jpg. That’s a second copy, on a different device or medium. In addition to that external hard drive, you also have an online backup solution. The online backup continuously scans your computer and uploads your data off-site to a data center. Kitten.jpg is included in this upload, and that becomes the third copy of your data.
So, read, and protect your stuff. As someone who has a “day job” dealing with tech issues, nothing saddens me more than hearing that “ALL MY STUFF WAS ON THAT”.