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[benn600]

This happened once before!  I was in the market for 500GB drives and randomly decided to check Best Buy.  They were $30+ cheaper than any online store.  So here we go again.  For the past week or two I've been looking for 2 or 3 1TB drives.  They could be internal and I'd use my extra My Book cases or external.

The best price was Amazon at $250.  Of course I prefer Buy.com because I get 2% back through a rewards site I use.  I was going to get a price match but I ALWAYS have problems when I try to get them to match price.

So again, I randomly decided to check Best Buy.  Didn't look through the ad yet so I thought "maybe, just maybe."  Viola! $230!  With rewardzone (Which pretty much counteracts tax) I'm down to $20 cheaper plus I get them right now!  With backup drive purchases I feel it is worth some extra money (if needed) to get them sooner than later because of course backing up is always better NOW.

So I decided to get three.  The key is that when I finish cleaning files up, I can store 100% of our data on the single drive.  This means I can have THREE archived copies (at various points in time) not to mention three good backups.  I plan on taking a 500GB drive and using it for our home DVDs because they deserve a hard drive backup (therefore 2 HDD and 2 DVD copies total).

With this and my going through our optical disc backups to clean them up (and index them) I think my backup routine is getting a much needed overhaul!  Three copies is probably overkill but I like the idea of three points in time.  I can keep one at home and possibly the other two at two other locations.

So where do I keep the offsite copies?  I'm concerned because tons of financial info and email, passwords, etc. will be on the drives so I'm a bit concerned about giving them to a friend to store.  I've thought about encryption but the WORST possible outcome would be losing the key and having our data but being unable to get it!  That would be a million times worse than anything.

[KingSparta]

Of course I prefer Buy.com

I Ordered 3 times From Buy.Com, After They Were Ordered, They Were Constantly Out Of Stock. After 30 Days I gave Up And Cancelled My Orders.

I Will Never Order From Them Again.

[benn600]

Funny how you and another person or two I know have had major issues with them.  I have placed 86 orders with Buy.com since 7/31/2002.  That is just more than one order per month.  (or close to 1/month   if you exclude returns & cancellations) Every order was incredible and I often experienced next day delivery if I ordered by noon or so...so I'd order Tuesday and get the stuff Wednesday!  FREE shipping!  I'm talking best price, 2% back, instantaneous shipping on 90% of my orders, and possibly NO DOA items.

[johnnyboy]

Benn
If you happen to loose your entire raid array to the point where it is no longer useable AND you happen to also loose the key to your encrypted data at the same time I would say you have the worlds worst luck.

You have a better  backup than most corporate setups I know of.

I'd say you're getting to the point where anything other than a full nuke taking out the whole country you are in is not going to effect you or give you ANY risk of loosing any data.

[benn600]

Haha, yea...unfortunately, I'm still in the process of completing my goals on these projects.  Not quite finished.  Somewhat vulnerable at this point.

But good point: I need overseas offsite backup.

lol

At that point I'd need a backup of me....hmmmmmm.  How many terabytes does it take to backup Ben?  (okay fine, Benn)

I don't care how unlikely, I'm not really interested in encryption because I've heard others shriek due to a lost key.  That would mean I'd need to be very careful with keeping several copies of the key--but they'd have to be separate from the drives!  It's just a nightmare...of course I could easily store them online at free email accounts...in a few email accounts.

Of course as we progress, data becomes exponentially more important.  I mean with my starting to digitize documents, I want to be able to throw them away (burn, recycle, whatever)...good fire starters.  I burned a stack of about 1,000 pieces of paper yesterday.  Took a while because I can't just put the whole stack in the fireplace.  It was school work that I don't need to keep anymore.  I have the digital form!!

But RAID doesn't even count.  I need one backup (1 drive) and of course for convenience it's nice to have a second.  Update the 2nd and drive it to the offsite location to swap.  At the last second (at Best Buy), I made the ultimate choice.  To impulse buy a 3rd.  Everytime I impulse buy stuff always turns out to be a great decision (pretty much always)...I can't think of a single time I regretted it.