(My) Paranoid Guide To Personal Backups (World Backup Day again...)

This is a small update of a blog published last year... just a bit more paranoid.

Following up on my blog about World Backup Day (here if you want to read it) I started my backup yesterday and came to reflect on how complex the world of personal data has become. Some time ago I published the picture on top of this blog as I now have more than 25TB of storage.

Of course this does not mean I have 25 TB of data (yet) but my average digital life is becoming much more complex that it was years ago, with hundreds of gigabytes of photos, music, books ... not something you can backup on DVD. So how do I protect my data? To come to my current backup habit I started with a single question: what can I trust? Here are the answers...

• Hard Disks - I do not trust any hard disk. Hard disk can lose data, either silently or in a big crash, files get corrupted. Disk producers advertise disks with mtbf (mean time between failure) of years but the reality is that mtbf measure exactly that: means. i.e. your drive can crash tomorrow. I will not go in details about the many ways files can get corrupted on a disk (wikipedia has a nice article here) but the idea here is: just copying everything on one hard disk and putting it away does not make me comfortable. And while someone says current SSDs can last a lifetime a lifetime is long, and I do not believe it: I already lost one after two year of usage. So much for the lifetime (on a different topic when I see the "lifetime" used nobody seems to say who's lifetime they are referring to...).

• Home NAS - I do not trust any NAS - network attached storage systems are nice and very powerful. You can setup mirroring (or other protection levels), access over the internet, use different protocols etc. And if a disk fail you can just replace it and the system will re-protect all your data. Except if your NAS motherboard crashes and you cannot access data in your disks anymore. Except if the filesystem get corrupted for whatever reason and you cannot access your data on BOTH disks. Of course you can call vendor's support, but today all vendors are quite fast in getting on the market new models every year and there is a non-zero probability that when you will need them your NAS will be already end of life (i.e. not supported). There are remediation for this, as you can find a used one on the internet, or insert the disks in a computer as they normally use some linux filesystem but it takes a lot of expertise to do so.

• Cloud Storage - I do not trust cloud storage - for many reasons, not least because there is normally not a real SLA associated with free services, saving terabytes of storage is costly and you never know what happen to your data, who has access to it etc. I use Syncplicity at work and use it to keep all my PCs in synch with my "live" data and also have space on most of the cloud storage providers, but using it to backup everything can be costly, cumbersome and insecure, plus your cloud provider can decide to change everything tomorrow (it is free, right?). And oh, you remember I said I lost an ssd drive before? When it happened Syncplicity immediately synchronized my second PC deleting everything... very nice. Luckily I had windows 10 "File History" turned on so I was able to at least go back to a few hours before (I think syncplicity allow to recover deleted data, but never tested it). As someone said, "there is no cloud, it is just someone else's computer".

So what I do? Right now I rely on redundancy. A single backup is NOT enough if what you are backing up is essentially your life (photo, bill receipts, tax data, banking statements...). I just cannot afford to lose it. You do not say "paranoid" easily. Here how it works:

• Live Data (i.e. my "Documents" folder plus a couple of directory I work on) are on syncplicity and replicated on my work and personal laptops.
• Every Laptop of the family has windows 10 File History turned on replicating on a 16TB NAS;
• Every Laptop of the family (we have 3) is backed up on an external dedicated HDD and on the NAS; I do a full-disk-image backup so I can use to restore it on a new hdd/ssd and get the laptop up and running quickly; (my work laptop is automatically backed up by IT using Avamar...);
• A Bootable USB ensure I can restore the backup on the new disk (I use a free software to do my backups);
• The most critical 2TB of my 16TB Nas are regularly backed up to an external 2TB drive. The two are kept in different rooms, the NAS is turned on only when a backup is needed (or if I need to get some old data from it) and, except when aligning them, they are never turned on at the same time (to avoid ransomware attacking both); Backups are done over FTP using different credentials than the ones used by the OS and all OS users only have read-only access to nas shares.
• A backup of my personal laptop and data is kept at DR distance (i.e. I do a local backup on external USB disk every time I pass by Rome and keep an additional 2TB NAS there).
• Every Hard Disk is renewed every 2-3 years. I cannot resist when I see 2TB for 80€, so every once in a wile I buy a new HD (or maybe a new SSD for the laptop) and swap everything to the new one, giving the old ones to friends or putting it in old computers I have here and there just for fun.

Is this a 100% reliable thing? Nope. this is just a way for me to ensure that even if bad event occur I do not lose everything.

I am curious to know how other people are handling home backups. What do you do? Where do you store your data? Hints? Feel free to add comments.