A tale of stupidity (AGAIN!) aka The importance of backups...

[lingyi]

I just got three 12TB WD external drives, decased them and completed 9TB of file transfers from the original two other drives (same data, one a backup), to two of them. Happily formatted the old 4TB drive to use in another PC, but when I checked it, it was still full! Yep! Formatted the 12TB drive!

Just a little panic as I realized, I still had the three of the four original drives intact (already formatted and starting copying files to the fourth), plus I had a completed copy job on the other 12TB.

I've restarted copying files from the two original drives to the new one, which is a good thing since it's a mini-stress test to run the drives for nearly 48 hours straight by the time it's done copying and verifying.

I'm starting a copy of the files from the second 12TB to the third, so I have a backup of the backup without having to start from scratch in the event of failure. No, I don't keep the backup drive offset (though I should), but with 14 drives as backup, it's impractical to move and update them offsite. I consider my original discs as the second backup and if something catastrophic enough happens to kill two of the three sets, I'll have much bigger things to worry about.

I do have two backups of my most important data ~500GB worth with the second in a fire resistant case at home with my tax papers (which are all online anyway).

[sophisticles]

That's a lot of porn.

[lingyi]

Naw...porn is better streaming. Err...I mean what is porn?

[ozymango]

I'm starting a copy of the files from the second 12TB to the third, so I have a backup of the backup without having to start from scratch in the event of failure. No, I don't keep the backup drive offset (though I should), but with 14 drives as backup, it's impractical to move and update them offsite. I consider my original discs as the second backup and if something catastrophic enough happens to kill two of the three sets, I'll have much bigger things to worry about.

I know the feeling, though not at quite the quota size you're dealing with -- while I've got literally dozens of hard drives scattered around my house with stuff collected on them over the years, my main "archive/backup" situation is, Three 4tb drives, two on-site (one is my "daily use" drive, in an NAS, the other is a backup of that daily use drive), and one I take back and forth to my office at work, theoretically a safe-enough location.) But it's enough to try to keep all drives synced, I try to do it at least weekly but come to think of it, it's been at least a month since I backed up the off-site backup.

Though I do make sure to keep a critical backup of stuff I just absolutely would be gutted if I lost, on at least another three drives, one of those in a safe-deposit box ... so I'm okay. I think. Mostly at this point I'm consigned to the fact that if something happened in my life where I'd need to resort to having to start setting things up again from backup -- that would be the least of my problems.

I do have two backups of my most important data ~500GB worth with the second in a fire resistant case at home with my tax papers (which are all online anyway).

Same here and amen.