Hey all! My wife and I have been thinking about ways to cheaply back up our data with more redundancy.
1. We use the free Google 15 GB cloud service for critical documents, including creative projects.
2. We also keep a back up of the documents from 1. on a portable hard drive inside of a firebox.
3. We also keep a backup of our pictures and music on the hard drive in 2. Because we are children of the 70's and 80's, a lot of that music's primary source is old CDs that we can't redownload if we lose it.
The data in 1.-3. total a little over half a TB presently, but it is always growing (in part due to our love of Led Zeppelin bootlegs, which we purchase from overseas on CD, and pictures). As you might have guessed, notwithstanding the firebox, our fear is fire. As unlikely as a fire is, the lockbox might not protect the data.
We've been noodling on how to cheaply improve our data security. We could survive without our pictures and music, but both are aspects of our life experience we'd like to protect if possible. Most cloud services we have found that would accommodate that much data require a monthly payment we consider cost prohibitive over the long haul.
The Mustachian solution we just dreamed up is to purchase a second hard drive, backup our data on both drives, and give one hard drive to close friends to store in their firebox. Every time we visit the other, we swap the old backup hard drive for the current. Redundancy improved!
Before we pull the trigger, we were curious if anyone else had a better solution or could improve on our idea.
Thanks all!
