One unambiguous early conclusion from my personal DR plan: I am lazy! ![]()
Remembering to connect a USB drive to the front port of my PC before shutting down for the night is an apparently insurmountable obstacle. In the eight months since initiating my DR plan, I've typically only synchronized local USB copies every couple of weeks (at best), and swapped copies in the safe deposit box only three times.
Fortunately, the automatic synchronization to my local networked storage is not lazy, and runs without fail every night. The automatic secondary replication also runs as scheduled, so I am protected from anything but a complete catastrophe that destroys our home entirely. Even then the copies in the bank vault will likely only be a few months out of date.
This experience echoes the complete lack of confidence I hear from customers about their conventional tape-based backup "plans" - particularly in remote offices. Fully automatic disk-to-disk backup removes human nature from the equation and dramatically improves real-world data protection.
For home use, Daniel Holmes suggested an online backup tool, and if your data requirements are relatively modest, this is an excellent alternative.
In my case I'm sticking with a small local networked storage infrastructure:
- The mirrored data is rapidly exceeding 100GB for my client alone, plus comparable amounts for some of our other clients. My "paperless" office, digital camera & camcorder ensure relentless future growth.
- Any time my NetApp laptop launches an online backup from home it completely trashes our broadband latency (crucial for gaming)
and the 400+ ms ping generates howls from my family. - Most important, as a flaming cheapskate I zealously avoid subscription charges whenever possible. For example, we have two ancient-but-fully-upgraded TiVo DVRs with lifetime (i.e., one-time) subscriptions that paid for themselves many years ago. Paying monthly fees in-perpetuity for online storage is just not going to happen on my watch. :-)
