Reply #40: I've decided that very little of what I have must...

[TreasonousBastard]

absolutely, positively be backed up. I've got tons of stuff "just in case..." and even more "maybe I'll get around to..." and most of it is recoverable from the original sources.

Stuff of my own, or not reasonably recoverable from anywhere else is a few gigabytes, and that easily gets stuffed on a few DVDs or CDs.

Now, no one really knows just how long a homemade DVD or CD will actually last. It's a different technology from factory ones, and some have already had the strata turned to dust under some conditions. Should I need something in another 10 years from one of those, I fondly remember the backups I made on a bunch of 120MB floppies made with a drive I was apparently the only one in the world to have bought. (I shoulda got a ZIP drive-- there might be one or two still out there.)

I had a small collection of backed up stuff on 5 1/4 floppies years ago and chucked them all when the oxide started flaking off. Mighta been something important on them, or maybe not. Same thing with those little floppies-- even though I actually have a drive for them, there's a lot of oxide flakes and dust in the box they're in.

And no one has heard of a hard drive failure? Thieves, floods, and fires?

Sooo... in the grand scheme of things, cloud backup where they have lots of redundancy is probably the best of a lot of mediocre solutions for those thousands of songs that will never be listened to, movies that will never be watched, and actual important stuff. Another alternative is the commercial services that take your daily backup tapes and store them in some cave, but if you have a decent sized business you probably heard about them.

Afraid of a backdoor that some asshole up there can use to see your stuff? Encrypt it before you send it up.