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I see... And I can set AOMEI up to do that alone? Say one week to disk A and the other on Disk B? My friend is not so technical and I do not wish to visit him that frequently...
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge". Stephen Hawking, 1942- 2018
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No - the whole idea is that backups should be air-gapped, so having them permanently plugged in renders the backups themselves vulnerable. For example, if they are plugged into a PC and the PSU breaks down, it can do enormous damage to all connected devices (I've had HDD's and mice fried when PSUs fail and pump too many volts down th +5 and +12 lines).
Simplest way is label them: "1st of month" and "15th of month" and he just plugs in the appropriate drive to do the backup. (You can Schedule Windows Backup with AOMEI Backupper Software[^] - I don't know if it's in the free version, but it comes up on BitsDuJour quite often as a free, legal, and licenced download if it isn't).
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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I've been experimenting with AOMEI backup (free version) and, thus far, every repeated backup in a sequence is an Incremental or Differential. I have not managed to persuade it to always do Full backups. That doesn't mean that it can't do it; it just means that if it is possible, then I haven't yet cracked how to do it. It is a slow exploration as I wait for the once-a-week cycles as I haven't enough disc space to do dailies.
FWIW: NAS unit with pair 3TB drives (largest size the NAS unit can handle) in the garage on homeplug Ethernet network. The PC is at the other side of the house.
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Is it plausible that your suggested setup would be massive overkill for some photos of the kids? If you were talking about operational data in a business, then possibly, but hey, it's not.....
If it was me (and obviously depending on the quantity), then copying them between a coupe of phones (mine, Mrs Wife's, grandma's etc) would do me - but then I don't have any kids and if I did they'd likely be so ugly nobody would want to keep photos of them...
Point I'm making is that not everything has to be military grade hardened, fireproof, malware proof and hacker proof at all times..
C# has already designed away most of the tedium of C++.
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And there's the rub: you never know how valuable your pictures are until they are gone ...
And "formalizing" backup procedures means they are more likely to be followed - which means future memories are protected as well.
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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RichardGrimmer wrote: or some photos of the kids
I have about 2TB of family pictures (my family  ). It would take me probably one year non stop to watch them all, but hey, I cannot delete a single one.
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I have about 1tb and the same problem, retirement project is to clean out the rubbish in the photo folders.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity
RAH
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Quote: and if I did they'd likely be so ugly nobody would want to keep photos of them...
Ah, ugly kid syndrome. I wish people realized that they suffered from this plight, but rarely do they acknowledge it.
Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend; inside of a dog, it's too dark to read. -- Groucho Marx
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I'm retired now, so I don't worry about preserving my employers operational data. But I do have nearly a terabyte of personal images. Images not only of children and family, but we've travelled extensively. How does one replace the images of the children growing up? Or the videos of the birth of the grandchildren? Or our visit to Normandy (Caen France), images of us shopping in Casablanca, or riding a camel with the Great Pyramid in the background, or watching penguins at Tierra del Fuego? Precious moments the we relive on occasion. Also leaves a record, a memorialization of one's life, a legacy for future generations.
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I use both an external drive and Microsoft OneDrive for backing up my photo's.
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I totally agree. The old photos will never change and if it is just for backup, I'd burn double layer Blu-rays with 50Gb on each. After the initial backup you only need to burn the new files. Copy the discs and give them out to your family. Serves as an off site backup and makes them happy.
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A "tiny" problem is, how many will have PC readers for double layer BDs five years from now? They don't even have it today! I used to make videos of social events, but from 3-4 years ago, I increasing often am told "DVD? Noo... I haven't used that for years, my PC doesn't have it". BD never was an option. I am told to upload the video to YouTube, so they can download it from there.
For 99% of people, BD is not an option at all. Even a 32 GB USB stick is more realistic - and not really that bad, except that you might, by accident or carelessness, loose it. I tell people: Buy two 32 GB USB sticks. Copy your files to one of them, and take it to work, put it in the top drawer of your office cabinet. Every week (at least), make a new backup on the second stick, bring that one to work, and take the first stick with you home for the next generation backup.
Well, internally the procedure is somewhat more complex, but this is the essemce of it. People use USB sticks, they don't use BDs.
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If you are looking to preserve stuff USB stick may be risky , you could loose them considering the small size. Also if you plug it in to a faulty usb port there are chances you can loose the data.Disks at-least can be labeled and stored............................................
Caveat Emptor.
"Progress doesn't come from early risers – progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things." Lazarus Long
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One backup concept that's very often overlooked:
You need to have a copy of your valuable stuff off-site!
All the backups in the world, and the NAS, and the airgaps - won't mean a thing if they're all in your house and then comes fire or flood (or other). In US, financial institutions are required by law to have an offsite backup location.
The cloud, however, doesn't cut it. Access is at the mercy of the cloud owner and if they go out of business (I've seen it), then what? Or they decide to up your fees 1000%, prepaid a year in advance - they've got your data. Pay or cry.
Or, make that air-gapped copy and keep it somewhere else that's not subject to the same vicissitudes of as your dwelling.
| Ravings en masse^ |
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| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you are seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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Yep, many people miss this. I had a client who kept his A/B set of weekly backups in the trunk of his car. He had a calendar reminder (or 3) to swap them in monday.
Ransomware should be a good reminder about air-gapping. But I have used NAS specific backup to a NAS Specific (not accessible from the network) USB Device. Just to make my life easier.
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Old but still great: The Tao of Backup[^]
It doesn't answer your question directly, but says a lot of wise words about backup.
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The first thing you need to tell your friend is that RAID isn't for backup purposes; it's for redundancy.
And I've sworn off of RAID when my onboard RAID controller died. Which meant unless I happened to have an identical motherboard, nothing would recover anything off of all four 4TB drives that were part of my fancy RAID-10.
And yes, I had backups - as I do understand the difference between "redundancy" and "backup".
My general rule: I tend to buy drives (all in the same capacity) in sets of 4: The live one, the offline backup sitting next to it, the off-site backup that I swap every month, and the fourth one is a spare ready to go at a moment's notice if any of the other three dies. When the capacity is exceeded, I replace the whole set for a higher-capacity set of disks, and the older ones can be reused in other machines (they're great candidates for a multi-drive RAID...although I've shot down that argument myself above).
It's not a cheap solution. But, unlike cloud storage, I remain totally in control of my own data, which IMO makes it worth it (otherwise it would mean I didn't place any value on that).
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You are right, but you must excuse the friend a little bit:
If what he experienced was disk crash, this would have been non-fatal in some of the RAID schemes. So if he had been using one of those schemes, his data would have been recoverable in spite of the disk crash.
Yeah, that is tunnel vision. But also how you naturally react after a crisis: I want something that can prevent exactly what I experienced - to heck with everything else.
We need to educate people about all the security threats, not just the one they have recently been exposed to.
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Not disagreeing. But consider my own personal experience (which I suppose is all I have to go with):
I've played with RAID on and off again over the last 2 decades or so, and honestly? No RAID's ever saved me from a dead drive - that's never happened to me. But I have experienced multiple controller failures.
So, RAID's never protected me from what it's explicitly been designed to protect you from, yet I've experienced RAID's single point of failure multiple times.
I'm sure RAID makes a lot of sense in large environments, but as a home user, despite being a fan of the idea, I have no good thing to say about RAID at this point. 
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RAID isn't a good replacement for a backup, especially internal RAID. A backup on an external RAID 1 isn't a horrible idea though.
A backup on a single external drive is, as a matter of fact, way safer, than to a single internal drive. Since the drive isn't powered up all the time, it doesn't wear out as fast as the internal drive. Unless he keeps plugged it in 24/7, then it's indeed a dumb idea.
My GF runs backups with Windows' built-in backupper on her external USB 3.0 drive which she plugs in roughly once a week. While that's definitly not enterprise-grade, it's far from a bad backup strategy.
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Kirill Illenseer wrote: Since the drive isn't powered up all the time, it doesn't wear out as fast as the internal drive. Unless he keeps plugged it in 24/7, then it's indeed a dumb idea.
This point can't be stressed enough for some people, and it's not just about drives wearing out. You have to ensure the data can't get modified when your system is infected with some ransomware that encrypts everything within its reach. Or deleted altogether.
So yeah, it's got to be offline.
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The answer is whatever the user finds easiest to accomplish. As others have mentioned, the options are local backup to external disk, RAID, backup to an internal disk or cloud backup. For pictures, I think Google has their new service that gives you unlimited high quality storage. There are a host of backup providers, many only charging $5/month which is certainly worth the aggravation of losing years of photos. I personally backup in the following manner:
Internal drive- I have a script that robocopies all of my data to an internal drive.
Acronis to external drive- I have continuous backup running.
Box- Have a 50G box account that backs up everything but pictures and music.
Google- backs up pictures.
Admitted this is a little overkill but I'd hate to tell the wife we just lost all of our music or pictures because I wasn't backing up properly.
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External drive unpowered will not die. Plug it in to backup. Do simple cloud too. Use two external drives if it makes you feel better.
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I am f***ing fed up with all that security stuff captcha, email confirmation, and even worse, code sent out to my phone to confirm  Do they know that there are still people out there who do not carry their phone 24/7 ? Or who are working in other countries and do not have data there ? Damn !
Let me DECIDE about what security level I want to use. If I do not want to enter 10,000 codes to read my email or check my orders, please LET ME DO SO.
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