vibratoking wrote:Sorry I'm not more sympathetic. It's just that you really gotta own your data... and not trust anyone but yourself to do those backups./quote]
I agree with owning your data. I also agree with doing it yourself. The cloud doesn't qualify in my book. There will be people saying I don't have pictures...they got lost in the cloud. Just sayin.
The cloud is OK... I mean it's just an off-site backup. Google Docs, Amazon S3, Windows SkyDrive, CrashPlan.
I'm a bit of a traditionalist on backups. At work, I rely on tapes and Iron Mountain. I run a full backup everyday and send them off-site every week. I just recently restored 80GB of pictures from a tape set I made 2 years ago and it worked perfectly (and I am most thankful!). So I've got my daily rotation of tapes, Windows Shadow Copy files, NAS volume level snapshots, etc. Servers in a controlled, locked environment.. Plenty of protection. But the home users, at best, have a portable hard drive (which typically fail with 2 years or less of use) and a high speed internet connection to use for backups. DVD's too, maybe... but they're getting to be too small, or data is growing to wildly, to be useful.
It'd be prudent to consider the following:
1. How to I protect my data from corruption or hardware failure? This can include file level corruption, virus corruption, hardware corruption, and a variety of other sources.
2. How do I protect my data from the external environment? House fire, flood, theft, etc.
3. Have I taken a recent inventory of my important data? PDA's and phones included. Can I live with a clean OS install and only your data restored? Or do I need to backup your system as an image for a complete bare metal restore? How much pain can I tolerate? I typically don't count things that can be recreated or re-downloaded as data, but your inventory might count that as data (program files, mp3 files, etc).
Answer those questions and a backup solution starts to develop....
I personally recommend a blend of local and cloud backups. That's what I do (I'm a full system backup right now just because I'm talking about it). Ultimatley, it's important to have both a local and an off-site backup. Cloud, IMNSHO, works just fine so long as it's tested at least quarterly for restorability and check logs frequently. Plug PDA's in on occasion and copy data to a folder included in your regular backup routine.