Grim... wrote:
Hearthly wrote:
Not a big fan of the cloud, I have nothing up there of any significance. Local drives/NAS/etc and a proper backup regime are my weapon of choice.
And if there's a fire?
You owe me £72.99 (£62.99 after cashback) for planting a terrible SEED OF DOUBT in my mind.
I have thought over the years that I should have an offsite backup because the house could theoretically burn down and every single copy of all our data is in this property, with the exception of a few things I have backed up to Google Drive. (Same goes for Mrs Hearthly, she has a few things on Drive, but for all practical purposes, everything is in the house.)
Some of it would be replaceable in time, but family pics and videos and suchlike would be lost forever. (Eleven years' worth of pics and vids of Hearthly Jnr growing up, for example.)
As such I bought a 2TB Western Digital My Passport Ultra drive from Currys for £72.99 with a £10 cashback offer* There are cheaper drives but this one has the benefit of (a) Being portable sized and taking all its power from USB and (b) hardware encryption.
My offsite backup location is a nice dry bedroom cupboard up at the in-laws house, so unless Ramsey gets nuked my offsite backup should be secure. And if Ramsey does get nuked we have bigger problems.
The hardware encryption isn't technically required as I'm sure my in-laws won't go snooping, but it does protect against theft I suppose, and also the very outside chance that my father-in-law be presented with a video of his own daughter having preggo sex. He's quite old fashioned, he wouldn't like that.
It's a fairly small amount of money to spend for pretty much total peace of mind when it comes to data security, and I've simply added the new WD drive to my usual backup rotation, which I generally run every two to three months. (I've just added a couple of extra jobs to Goodsync. Retrieving the drive, backing up to it, and taking it back won't be any hassle as we're up there at least once per week anyway.)
* As is usual for these cashback offers, you have to submit an online claim in a specific 36 minute window between 2am and 3am in the morning, at between 45 and 47 days from the purchase date, whilst stood on one leg with a penile erection not exceeding an angle of 50 degrees, and if your claim is accepted you'll get a tenner deposited into your bank account within a further 90 days. I'm slightly exaggerating, but not much. It's quite clear they only expect around 10% or so of people to go through with getting their cashback, but I will, as I can be very bloody-minded about such things.