So, for the reason that quite a while ago my external HD crashed; I do not think that that might be of value or interest to people reading my blog; I have to tell you something. While it turns out I didn’t lose any data, thanks to my backup stategy I improve from time to time.

I bet anyway some of you probably don’t have a backup solution for your machine. Don’t tell me I didn’t warn you when your HD crashes. And it will crash, it’s just a matter of time!

Some years ago, after a very time-consuming loss of data, I wanted to solve this new problem of backing up data in the best possible way, so I started researching all this stuff that I never really paid attention to before. I started looking into external HDs, NAS boxes (because it would be cool to stream data to my home network in addition to providing storage for my PC), RAID, and everything in-between. But it probably took a weekend of research into these things before I realized the the simple yet so very important distinction between data redundancy and data backup.

As you probably know there are different RAID-Levels most of them provide besides an improvment of read/write speed a data security.

Redundancy is something you get e.g. by having two or more HDs in a RAID1 or RAID5 configuration. If one HD fails, you can recover your data from the other HDs, either due to mirroring or due to having a parity disk that will allow your data to be recreated. However, this is not a backup!

If your whole PC is fried, or whatever it might be, your data is irreparably lost. Backup is something that should protect you from data loss even in the case of a severe hardware failure.

My solution is very simple provided by rsync that copies data from one pc to another (via ssh). Very simple - but just as effective & safe.

When thinking about backup solutions I got this obviously overstated idea: If my backup files are in, let’s say Hong Kong while I’m in Nuremberg I’ll be able to recover my files even if Nuremberg falls into the ocean from a earthquake (assuming I survive the ordeal).
Okay, you’re right - I’m loosing track of reality, of course that’s not necesarry at all. Just a few years ago this would have been inconceivable for private purpose but nowadays it’s not such a bad idea…

Nevertheless I continue in copying data to a machine that’s just a few arm length from my workstation.