Jarvik7 Wrote:@bladethecoder: It depends how valuable they are. Most people just store the offsite copy at their parents'/friends' house or work. If it's super important you can get a safety deposit box at a bank.

I live with my parents, I don't really have any real-life friends, and I don't get any storage space at school ;)

For the banks, as well as being expensive to start with, I noticed they charge a hefty fee for accessing your box, which if nothing else is a good way to encourage you not to do it often enough. Probably overkill in my case anyway.

I was looking at the self-storage companies, but it seems what they mean by a "small locker" is quite a lot bigger than what comes to mind when I hear the word.

My entire worldview has been shattered by the revelation that DVDs/CDs/BDs degrade over time.

Now I have to go freak out over everything I own.

I had stuff on 5.25 floppies, and quite possibly none of it is readable any more, but I guess if I haven't used it in 5 years it doesn't matter really...

I've only had problems with degradation of really cheap CD-Rs from like 2000 that I left in my car for several years. ;p They also happened to be 'coloured' back when I thought it was so cool to have my CDs in different colours (black in particular). Not that I use CD-Rs now, I use... I mean, I buy everything so it doesn't matter.

A philosophy amongst software developers is that if you truly want to make backups that will last you need to:

1. RAID 1 or RAID 5
2. Period complete/incremental backups on a separate HDD or more commonly tape drives that you store someplace safe between backups(Like a safe).
3. Offsite backup; this could be done on tape disks that you store someplace really safe like a bank safe deposit box.

and for added extra protection you mix point number 2 and do backups to a server at some other geographical location.

Of course, you also encrypt all your backups just in case one is stolen/lost.

This strategy is really only for those with highly sensitive data(ex. companies, financial data...etc). It's completely overkill for personal backups.

At home I just backup everything onto an external HDD and always keep 2 copies(local and the external) and every so often I compress and archive the backup and stick it on DVD's. I don't really need anything more than that. For code I learned a long time ago to use a version control system(I started out with SVN).