I loved reading Shawn Blanc’s post about online backup. He did a great job reviewing the pros and cons of the best options. I’ve avoided most of these services because I have never personally met someone that has restored from an online backup. I have used Amazon’s S3 service for storing and sharing files, but never considered it for a backup option due to the steep price for large amounts of data.
Following up on the SSD post from Jeff Atwood, I love my SSD boot drive but I keep the majority of my data on a secondary HDD. My primary home office computer is a late 2010 iMac with a 256GB Apple SSD and a secondary 2TB "data" drive. Here's how I have configured this setup to maximize the speed of the SSD but the storage capacity (and maybe reliability) of the HDD.
Category 2 Data I posted previously about finding your data buckets. It amounts to sifting through all of your digital records and assigning a cost and benefit. The ultimate goal, is to know what you have and how to secure it.
I assign email messages to category 2, along with receipts and warranties. Most email is unlikely to be crucial since I've probably already acted on it in some way. This is very different from family photos or tax documents which are generally irreplaceable.
Do yourself a favor and learn this:
http://www.dpbestflow.org/backup/backup-overview#321
Trust me on this one. The American Society of Media Photographers KNOW how to secure data. I know a half dozen people that took backup too lightly and suffered the consequences. Including myself.
Media is cheap. Memories are not.
