25-03-2020, 10:43 AM
(24-03-2020, 10:51 PM)Tony Griffiths Wrote: One of the mistakes that website owners (and people with many photographs or other saved material) make is not to keep off-line backups. It's all very well having a website or other material backed up on some remote server - but even that can fail. The trick, if you have a lot of data, is to employ two external hard drives and back up, manually, to each. Don't reply on automated backups; I've tried several and, guess what, they don't always work. Last year my web hosting company managed to loose over three-quarters of my site - and, naturally, they had no backup. However, with three offline copies available, it was soon restored.
Need a reliable external hard drive? I've found Western Digital "Elements" very satisfactory. I run them for three or four years and then retire them, just in case (though as an experiment, I kept one going for over six years I believe).
Absolutely agree about the value of hard drive back ups. My computer has suffered various "infestations" and breakdowns over the years leading to total loss of data, potentially serious to me as I keep all rental accounts for our various properties on it. However I have always used a separate hard drive to back up and for the last few years free backup software from 2 Bright Sparks which only backs up changed files and is therefore quick. This has always had me back in business very quickly. You do have to remember to back up when you have done work and keep your hard drive safe. At work we used two and kept one in the night safe at our bank rotating them daily ensuring the worst that we could lose was 1 days data.