Protecting Data from Future Loss - PhysOrg Article

[icekin]

PhysOrg.com Article - Digital Dark Age may Doom some Data

Reading the above article and the associated comments got me thinking about my own data backup system. I have recently been moving my documents to Google Docs and Spreadsheets, which has a limit of 5000 documents. An added advantage of this is that I don't have to worry about different versions of the documents on my desktop and laptop and synchronizing between them.

I do regular backups of important data onto my external drive and laptop, so I always have at least 2 sets of data besides the one on my main machine. I monitor the S.M.A.R.T status of all my drives using Speedfan and defragment them often. I don't know how reliable the S.M.A.R.T measure is. Finally, I buy a new hard disk once every 2 to 3 years and copy all my existing data to that. Since hard disks at least double in capacity every 2 to 3 years, it is usually large enough to accomodate all my existing data build up across all the current drives.

What strategies do others here on DC employ to protect against future or accidental data loss?

[J-Mac]

I've been trying Box.net out for about a month - pretty nice, and they offer a free plan and also a couple of inexpensive plans also. I also tried Live Mesh but that is still a mess currently.

Otherwise, backup to external drives and optical media, though those will eventually not be usable - hopefully it won't matter by then! (I ain't getting any younger; maybe some media will outlast me!)

Jim

PS - Monitoring the S.M.A.R.T. status is a good thing, but I can say from experience that drives can - and do! - fail even with a perfectly good S.M.A.R.T. rating! Be careful even when it looks good!

[f0dder]

defragmenting doesn't help wrt. harddrive lifetime - if anything, it reduces it because of the stress it puts on the drive. Not that you should stop defragmenting, just saying

S.M.A.R.T is nice because when it tells you your drive is going to die... it IS going to die. But you can't rely on things being hunky-dory just because there's no error messages, there's a lot of conditions that SMART can't detect :/