Where is your stuff? Is it safe? Is it convenient?

I heard a quote recently that said if your data isn't backed up to three locations; it doesn't exist.

This is clearly nonsense, although it's not a bad philosophy to have. Last week I suffered a catastrophic (albeit self inflicted) Mac failure. This caused me to restore everything from my Time capsule which hadn't done a complete back up for a couple of weeks, due to the fact that I'd moved a huge amount of images out of iPhoto and into normal folders (For Adobe). The restore took an astonishing three days and in the middle we also suffered a blip of a power cut, which caused the Time Capsule to reboot, but fortunately didn't interrupt the restore process.
14000 photos, a few Gigabytes of home movies and 9000 songs all in the balance.

Except that they weren't really, as I had other backups.

All of my music is backed up to a second HDD, in normal folders on an external HDD. It's also on Google Music, which lets me stream it to my iPhone. Although I've never tried downloading it, the option is clear enough, it's probably quite easy?

My photos are also backed up to the same HDD, and also dropbox and were last backed up a month or so back.

My home video's are backed up on the same HDD and also Box.net (because of the more generous allowance they gave me).

My contact are synchronised with Gmail, which offers better flexibility across multiple devices.

My Calendar appointments are also synced with Gmail, so that information would have been safe too.

My Apps - I'd have lost if Time Capsule hadn't been able to restore them.

So worse case scenario, in the unlikely event of a total HDD failure, plus a Time capsule failure (which the power cut in the thunderstorm could realistically have caused). I should have had a second, sometimes third option up my sleeve.

Paranoid? Perhaps.
Prepared? Definitely. If you can't say the same, it's perhaps worth reconsidering your backup options and planning ahead. Especially if you have sentimental digital data!



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