I use multiple external drive backups, with off-site storage of them until needed. Multiple backups have definitely “saved my bacon”. Here’s the story I tell my clients and students:
I had a technical writing class when I was earning my first degree back in 1993. The instructor didn’t believe in lots of busy work. Instead, he told us on the first day of class that we’d only be writing a single paper, with 4 drafts of it due throughout the semester. After each of the first 3 drafts were turned in, we’d have a 15-minute session with him, one-on-one, where he’d give us guidance and correct any bibliography problems. Those first 3 drafts were pass/fail. Turn them in, you passed. Don’t, you’d fail. Fail one of those, don’t bother coming to class any more because you’d failed the class anyway. Class was 3 hours, one day a week.
The paper was to be 25-35 double-spaced typewritten pages (this was before computers were common for college students, even though I had one). There had to be at least 4 visual aids (photos, charts, etc.), and the bibliography had to be done properly to a specific format.
It was 2 weeks from the due date for the paper. I had it basically finished, I was simply printing and proofreading it each day. I’d make the corrections that I needed to the hard copy, then fix the issues on the computer and print it to go over again the next day. Each day after printing, I’d copy the paper from my hard drive to a floppy diskette. I had 5 diskettes, one for each day of the workweek. I also had a tape drive, something that was very uncommon for home PC owners, with 3 tapes that I rotated through. I ran a tape backup each Saturday and a test restore each Sunday. 4 weeks earlier, my test restore of the tape failed. My tapes were about a year old, so I figured that meant it was time to get new tapes - which I did.
One morning after I’d proofread the copy of my paper I’d printed the day before, I turned on my PC to make the corrections, and… “No disk or disk error. Insert boot disk and press any key to continue…”. (You long-timers remember that.)
Oh crap, my hard drive had failed! After a quick panic attack, I forced my self to calm down and see if I had enough money to go get a replacement drive. I did (I’d be eating ramen for the next couple of weeks, but I could get a new drive), so I got one and installed it in my computer. You have to understand that at this point in time, MS DOS with Windows 3.x was still the standard OS. This was a good thing, because it meant that I only had to install 4 floppies to the new drive and then I could restore my tape backup. It took a couple of hours to format the drive, but I was OK.
Once I got DOS and my backup software installed, I restored my most recent backup tape, but to my horror, the directory all my documents, including my paper, were in was corrupt on the tape. I restored that folder from the tape before that. Everything except my paper was restored. That was OK, I had my floppies still - 5 copies that were only very slightly different from the printout I had. Long story short, 4 of those 5 floppies were corrupt, even though they had all verified OK when I had copied the paper to them.
Fortunately, the last floppy was good, and I got a 5-day-old version of my paper back. It was a long day, but I was saved. The moral of the story is
backup
Backup.
BACKUP!
I could have re-typed the entire paper if I’d had to because I had the hard copy, but I was sure glad I didn’t need to. That’s the other lesson I learned: Hardcopy is the best backup.
That was my first experience with having to rely on a tape backup and having it fail at the crucial time. I’ve had plenty more of those times, enough that when external USB3 hard drives became available, I swore off tapes and have never looked back. I don’t believe in cloud backups (I’ve seen too many get compromised by attackers), but I am a FIRM believer in multiple copies of backups, stored in multiple locations.
