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Old Mar 19, 2013 | 9:07 am
  #21  
PTravel
FlyerTalk Evangelist
 
Join Date: Mar 2004
Location: Newport Beach, California, USA
Posts: 36,062
I don't like cloud storage for a number of reasons that I won't go into here.

Everything depends on just how "safe" you want to be. I have 2 3TB Raid 5 NAS devices sitting on my gigabit LAN. One is primary LAN storage, the second mirrors the first. In addition, I have a 3 TB USB drive sitting on a thin client at work that is connected to my home LAN via VPN. Once a night, critical data files files are backed up to the work machine. The only exception to the nightly backup are music files (I compose, mix and record, and uncompressed 96 khz, 24-bit audio takes up a LOT of room) -- they're just too big backup over the internet. For those, I backup after every session to a 3 TB portable USB drive in a shock-mount case that travels in my computer bag. Both USB drives are USB 3.0 -- if I ever need to restore from them, I can do it relatively quickly.

A long time ago, when I had an IBM XT with a 20 megabyte hard drive, I failed to back up a show I was working on and lost the original performance data forever (fortunately, I had recorded the audio to 8-track analog and since have been able to digitally remaster, however the MIDI data, from which I could modify the performance is, gone). Ever since then, I've been rather paranoid about losing data. Though my system is a little more complicated than the norm, it could be duplicated for well under $1,000 and offers triple redundancy: (1) RAID 5 contemplates the loss of one drive without losing any data, (2) the mirrored NAS contemplates the loss of the first NAS, and (3) the off-site storage of key data, combined with shock-mount portable USB drive, contemplates the loss of my entire home computer system.
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