Originally Posted by
javabytes
And CryptoLocker will just as quickly encrypt your USB hard drives. And mapped network drives.
Not to mention an external hard drive might safeguard against drive failure, but not physical disasters such as your house burning down.
So truly enlightened Earthlings will have a fairly more robust backup system.
Perhaps. I wasn't suggesting USB external drives as the ideal solution. I was rebutting the OP's argument that most people don't perform daily backups because it's too expensive and/or too much work.
My backup solution is certainly a little more complex. I work out of a remote office where I manage and maintain several physical PC and laptops, as well as a dozen or so virtual machines. Thus USB drive backups aren't practical for my architecture for several reasons.
I use MS Server 2012 Essentials to backup all client machines (physical and virtual) daily to mirrored drives on the server. The mirrored drives on the server are periodically backed up to an additional drive on the server, which is periodically swapped with another drive stored off-site. This solution also supports automatic backup to Microsoft's cloud, but I'm not currently using it. Once I set the system up my only incremental effort is to periodically swap the server backup drive with it's off-site partner.
Is that enlightened enough? This is an open invitation to all to suggest improvements or alternatives if you see any holes in my strategy.
Originally Posted by
mikew99
Unfortunately, making backups is one of those lessons that most (if not all) human beings have to learn the hard way, through the painful, repeated loss of data that they care about.
Amen. Been there. Done that. Lesson learned.