You might be tempted to buy a 1 terabyte or a 2 terabyte hard drive with prices well below $100 for a new one-off Amazon and use that as your primary backup. That’s all fine and dandy for the hard-core games your teenager’s been downloading, your sweetie’s chick flicks from Netflix and the classic rock LP collection that you’ve transferred over to digital media, but think twice before using that as your primary backup for your hard drive. Below are a couple reasons why.
The most important reason was a lesson I learned from my father, an insurance broker, a long time ago. Never keep your important papers (i.e., backup computer files) in your house. If your house burns down, where do you think your files are? If your house gets blown down by a tornado, where do you think your files went? You want an offsite backup for your files, FAR offsite. If a chemical tank car blows up at the local rail yard, you’ll thank me, and Amazon or Mozy or whomever, that your files are safe and sound 3000 miles away in California. And in Argentina. And in England. Redundancy is the name of the game here. All these online backup services use multiple data centers in different countries to protect themselves against regional calamities. As an aside, this is also a good idea for some of your important papers or at least copies of them. If your house burns down, you’re gonna need that DVD showing the video you took of the house and it’s contents to get your insurance company to pay up. Give a copy to your lawyer, stick one in your safe deposit box, and send one to your anal brother-in-law that lives 2500 miles away because he’ll triple file it and never lose it. Same thing with insurance policies, birth certificates, all that stuff.