Storage

[Courier265]

Simple answer - buy more external drives and simply backup what you have.

[toby1]

Exactly what I said, a continuous loop of buying backup drives to insure against the ones that will fail. Data storage is entirely dependent on the technology that made it and in any form this has a finite lifespan.

[Im-a-Ridah]

[Courier265]

[Riejufixing]

(buying more external drives and simply backup what you have may not be best practice)

You should have backups of your backups. Nothing's sure, though, except that something can go wrong, and sometimes does. It's about risk reduction. Someone up there ^ mentioned the increased risk when changing a device in a storage array of whatever sort. True.

[toby1]

To be philosophical at one time we had books to write data, and this data can still be read and recalled from many hundreds of years (not meaning to state the bleedin obvious here) but get my drift.

In the late 70,s / 80s I had a BBC B computer with a 5 inch floppy drive that stored KB of data. I also had a ZX81 with an external 3 inch drive. The fact is that technology moved forward to store more and more data. Now I would find it very difficult if I could find my old discs to source an old unit to recover them. And so the much talked about RAID for storage and backup will move the same way. Superseded by better technology to offer more storage and so many more TB+ to archive.

I'll bet courier265 did his backups in the 80's to magnetic tape. The fact is that we have so much data to try and keep nowadays we are victims of our own lifestyles. I have a copy of 1500 vintage cookbooks no way would I ever read them, but I store them along with TBs of music I'll never hear all of. But I am not alone, I even have two 32GB USBs on my car key ring, most people do to exchange and store data. These I know from experience fail quiet often. As people have said on here risk is a calculated thing, the thing is if you are not able to afford a RAID system, or more backup drives and supposed fail proof systems like continuous subscription to the cloud your data will become lost like the dinosaur BBC B and ZX81.

[Courier265]