Poll Shows Backup Frequency Increasing, Results Still Depressing

Originally published at: https://tidbits.com/2020/06/19/poll-shows-backup-frequency-increasing-results-still-depressing/

Backblaze’s annual poll asking how often people back up their data shows small improvements across the board. But the percentage of people who either don’t back up at all or back up once a year or less is still far too high.

Thanks to TidBITS and a previous Joe Kissell book on backups I rotate two 4GB partitioned drives: 2GB for Carbon Copy Cloner full bootable backup each morning at 3:00 a.m. and the other 2GB partition backs up continuously using TimeMachine. These are swapped with one offsite every 8 days. (Simply because I got tired of every week.) My further hole card is the entire 1.45TB is backed up with Backblaze. I only had to lose everything once to become a backup believer. At any point in time I have three complete backups.

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When I think of all the family history that goes up in smoke when a hard drive fails it’s really sad. People have thousands of photos, videos, emails on their computers that document their existence. Without a backup that all disappears. Even if there is no failure it can somehow become corrupt. Text messages are even more vulnerable. Ever since the beginning of the digital age historians have worried about how these things will be preserved. Ken Burn’s Civil War series used letters from soldiers to their families to bring home the personal experience of that conflict. Those letters were kept in boxes in attics for a century before they were rediscovered.

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