Safety in the cloud

I agree and heavily recommend Google Drive for backups. The 15 GB "free tier" limit is fairly generous and I never exceeded it yet. Photos backed up using the "High Quality" setting do not count in the 15 GB limit and are essentially free.

Note that once you install the Google Drive desktop app, two choices are offered:

• One is to backup the full computer using selected existing folders (typically on Windows "Documents" and "Pictures"). If you use that mode, you'll have to add your specific files directory if not stored under Documents.
• The second option is to use the "legacy" Google Drive mode. This creates a "Google Drive" directory on your local drive, and anything you place in there is backed up. 

The difference between both is when you want to access your files from more than one computer at the same time. With the legacy system, anything you put in the "Google Drive" folder on one computer automatically gets duplicated on a second computer that has Drive installed with the same account. This is very convenient for e.g. a desktop + a laptop setup. You can work on your files offline and they sync automatically. As a bonus you can access all these files from the google drive web site or your cell phone. This is similar to the way Dropbox works.

Finally a word on Safety: when you use these cloud-based services, please do yourself a favor and activate the "two factor security" setting (aka 2FA). Whether it's Google Drive or Dropbox or OneDrive, they all have a 2FA mode. This works by requiring an extra code (typically generated by your cell phone via an app or SMS or phone call) on top of your password.  twofactorauth.org is a convenient site to check how to enable 2FA for a variety of services.

Flash Drives

I have a good friend who works in the digital imaging field. Her opinion is that one reason they're called "flash drives" is that the data can be "gone in a flash" for any of numerous reasons. Although I also rely on flash drives for easy data storage, I would not base my entire backup plan solely on one. I don't believe that's what Joe is suggesting, but this is one additional reason to not.

Three copies

At $10 for 64GB thumb drives, you need to follow the IT rule - 3 copies of the file before it truly "exists". Put two of them on thumb drives, and one on a solid state drive or spinning hard drive.

I would also recommend one offsite repository -- some "cloud" storage somewhere. Windows and Macs both have cloud solutions with free space -- or more space for a small fee if needed. Google and Dropbox also provide free space.

The truly ideal backup strategy is this:

Copy one - the original file on your device.

Copy two - cloud storage offsite that autosyncs critical folders on your device.

Copy three - Passport drive with a daily scheduled off-hours backup of critical folders.

Do this three-copy strategy with auto backups and you should be well protected.

But if nothing else, go invest in a couple thumb drives and make copies by hand. Any backup is better than NO backup!

GUARANTEED TO FAIL
Remember, all digital storage mechanisms (except perhaps cloud storage since they already have a solid backup strategy) is guaranteed to fail eventually. One copy of precious files is just asking for it!

What if I told you your entire hobby DVD and book collection were guaranteed to suddenly turn to dust without warning, but for a small fee we could make copies for you and store them in a fireproof safety deposit box? Wouldn't you want to do that?

That's what we're talking about here -- those files are going to go *poof* at some point (likely in the next several years at most), so make backups!

The three locations or it

The three locations or it doesn’t exist also usually requires one of those to be off site.  But that is a catastrophe backup.  And while tragic if you lose you track plan or railroad photos in a fire it is not as important as the fact you just lost you house and everything else in it (if you want stories about what happens with your railroad in a fire I can give you that from first hand experience)

Also don’t confuse a USB connected drive with a thimb drive.  Thumb drives are generally made as cheep as possible and folks pull them out and shove then in and store them in all sorts of questionable locations.  All things that do not increase the lifespan of the drive.  They. Also pull them out without ejecting them.  So thumb drives are not very dependable.

But a USB drive either solid state or conventional are pretty dependable.  

The ideal world has the following 

one file on your local drive.

one file off site (ideally backed up semi regularly)

and one copy in a redundant backup that backs up on a regular schedule that happens often enough that if you lose the file it won’t hurt to have to.work from an old backup.  A three month old file of a photo is one thing but a three month old backup of a file you spend 5 hours a week working on will lose you 60 hours of work.  So only the user can determine how often backups need to happen.  But if you are backing up quite often you should consider a raid setting of some variation as the backup process will ultimately cause the drive you are backing up to fail.  But having it on a raid means you swap out the bad disk and keep going.

But the most important backup strategy is one that the user understands and will follow.  A backup plan that you don’t actually use is not worth anything.  I knew a company that had a local backup set to backup every day at night and once a week off site (also at night).  They had great hardware and such.  And did everything just right.  Except that every computer in the place (including the server) was turned off by 8 and for over a year the backup was NEVER made.  And no one log’Ed into the accounts or machine that had the warnings on it.  

This happend because no one in the office that understood computers was in the loop about the backup and the managers in the loop about the backup where all but illiterate 

thier are reasons why figuring out a backup strategy is not easy.  And why one size does not fit all.

-Doug M

True ...

True, but these days folks are shooting digital photos of the family and those irreplaceable photos will go bye-bye if they're not backed up.

As a modeler (not speaking as a publisher now), I would be sad over losing a model railroading digital image and doc collection -- but I would really be heartsick and upset if I lost a family digital photo archive forever.

My backups....

I'm a believer in defense in depth. I've got a 4-disk RAID system that I haven't quite figured out how to back up (I do have a spare drive for it) since it's about 9TB in size, a Cloud backup called CrashPlan (https://www.crashplan.com/en-us/) which saved my hiney when a Microsoft "Feature Update" killed my laptop, and OneDrive stores a bunch of my stuff up in the cloud... and there is Google Photos.

I've also got an assortment of Passport and MyBook type external drives as well.

Apparently Micron is showing off a 1TB micro-SD card. Yeah - the size that goes in your phone.

We now have the ability to lose more data more easily than at any time in history.

More data

We have the ability to lose more data than at any time in history, but do we actually need all that data?  In an arguably saner pre-digital photo time when photos cost money to take and took actual space to store, people exercised a little more discretion about what got saved.  And the result is arguably more useful.  If you have to wade through a couple hundred photos to find the one you’re thinking of that’s doable, if it’s 20,000 photos it’s daunting enough that you might well just give up.  A well curated smaller collection is a lot more useful than an uncurated huge collection.  Sophisticated image aware search improves the situation a bit, but not as much as some serious weeding out of redundant or junk photos would.  The good side of digital photography is that you can pound away on the shutter in hopes of getting a few good shots.  The bad side is that having done that, most of us are either too reluctant or too lazy to sort out the few good shots and trash the rest.

Same goes for all kinds of cruft floating around on our disk drives these days.  I have a directory full of emails from the dcc working group in the early 90’s.  I haven’t looked at any of them since, well, probably the early 90’s.  Why do I keep them?  Maybe storage is too cheap - I haven’t had to make tough choices about what to nuke to free up disk space for many years now since big drives got cheap.  Well except raw video files.

So now we have bazillions of photos and we’re worried we’re going to loose them, so we need to spend more time (and money) backing them up.

OK, rant over.  Time to buy a bigger drive for my next backup.

Another aspect to Ken's comment, is

Who is going to do what with your glorious collection of backed-up-the-ying-yang digital drooling when you kick the bucket?  Do you honestly think your nephew, or whatever, is going to put in the time to dig through all the cruft to find that wonderful photo of auntie Matilda from 1954?  It's the ultimate hubris to think that 7 billion people on this planet all have archives worth keeping.  A friend of mine is now gibbering in a home, his wife has passed on, and his three kids had two years to dig through the family home to find what most of us would consider irreplacable - his 40 year archive of scanned family photos, all neatly organized and annotated.  I know it was there, they know it was there.  Not a peep out of them about keeping it when the whole mess went to a reclaimer.  The whole collection went into a dumpster, backups, computer drives, everything.  No one wanted it.

It's wonderful to do all that work, but make sure you're doing it for someone who cares.

Blair

Interesting you think

other people need to care about your own interests.

Curating digital archives

Certainly one man's treasure is another man's junk -- that's always been true well before the digital age.

We've been facing the need to cull through a large collection of questionable accumulation -- my 90 year old mom's possessions. She reached the point a couple years ago she no longer could live alone safely, so we moved her in with us. Shortly after that she suffered a stroke that paralyzed her left side, making it doubly necessary for her to live with assistance.

Anyhow, when we moved her out of her house, we downsized her considerably. Her garage was piled to the rafters with boxes of stuff she had never unpacked from her last move, plus her house had three bedrooms jammed full of accumulated "stuff". You could just barely move around in her own bedroom!

We did appreciate that she had saved all her old photos because we found photos of her and my aunts and uncles we never knew existed! My mom used to ride a horse as a young girl -- wow, who knew? She had travelled to California as a young teen and dressed up in a grass skirt -- another surprise!

While it has taken effort to sort through all the photo archive, I for one appreciate that we had more photos rather than fewer photos. It's actually been a delight to learn more about my mom's youth through these photos. Yes, there were a lot of junk photos that we just threw out too, because we had no idea who or what they were.

But like I said before, one man's treasure is another man's junk -- and that's been true for as long as man had been around. The digital age hasn't changed that truth in the least!

I believe we are only saving

I believe we are only saving our files for ourselves. Same with photos etc. Most of the things we save have either a sentimental value or a memory attached to them.

Cloud as part of Backup Strategy...

Dear MRHers,

While I get the inclusion of "the Cloud" as part of the "3-part backup/disaster recovery" methodology,
I can't help but think that Cloud Services are just as vulnerable, even more-so in some cases, when considering:

- Sporadic/no internet connection conditions
(search "Australia NBN roll-out")

- Server-side Upgrade/misconfig of the Cloud service
(EG iTunes iCloud reconfig caused a Studio client of mine to loose 5 major gigs because it inexplicably cancelled the performer's studio sessions during a "scheduled Cloud service upgrade"...
Funnily enough, Apple's "strict no data roll-back possible" policy got pretty flexible once the ACCC was called-in...)

- Credential failure/corruption
(loose/forget/change your password = loose your Cloud backup
same for 2-Factor Authentication if you change your email address and/or mobile phone number,
and forget to "redirect" the 2FA requests to the new address/number first...)

- "Change of Cloud-service owner/account policy/capacity offering"
(recall the "Photobucket" cloud-storage account change "issue" of recent memory?)

Mechanically and electrically reliable buss-powered "passport" drives,
which are machine-agnostic, are cheap,
and not subject to "over the internet" business-changes or technical vagaries.
(I recently recovered a complete Post-Production facility in Singapore, which had all of their editing systems + media servers taken-out by a "WannaCry" infection... Cloud Recovery was unsuccessful but a buss-powered drive full of System Images from my archives saved the day...) 

Dropping 3+ of them in different trusted geographically-seperate physical locations is not hard...
(admittedly, this makes "incremental/point-in-time" backups more challenging to add to the "archives",
but I have other strategies for those... ).

...and I know exactly where and on-what-media my data is...
(I can take-responsibility-for and fix a physical HDD that I own and control,
I have none of that ability-to-personally-do-anything-to-resolve-a-fault-condition once/if I abdicate responsibility and upload to a intangible "virtual HDD" somewhere "in the Cloud")

Check most Cloud service EULAs, paraphrased
"...some degree of care, but no responsibility..."

Happy Modelling,
Aim to take personal responsibility for One's own data-archives/disaster-recovery,
Prof Klyzlr

You missed some

 other reasons not to use the cloud:

• Avalanches and landslides
• Earthquakes
• Sinkholes
• Volcanic eruptions
• Hydrological disasters
• Floods
• Tsunami
• Limnic eruptions
• Meteorological disasters
• Cyclonic storms
• Blizzards
• Hailstorms
• Ice storms
• Cold waves
• Heat waves
• Droughts
• Thunderstorms
• Tornadoes
• Wildfires
• Frogs
• Gnats (or lice or mosquitoes or other small insects)
• Flies (or swarms of insects)
• Wild Beasts
• Pestilence of livestock
• Boils
• Locusts
• Darkness

I think how to maintain and

I think how to maintain and organize a digital photo library for model use would be its own VERY useful article.

it is surprising how little information is out thier about that topic.

As for photos.  I think that digital photography is ultimately going to create a time that humanity will lose track of.  No one is going to go through the old computers of deceased relatives or friends looking for photos,  dealing with someone else’s computer is a pain and going through hundreds or thousands of photos is a bigger pain so when combined the result is no one will do it.

As for the tragedy of losing old photos.  I think that is something that folks radically over value.  Everyone SAYS that they treasure thier photos.  But then the leave them on thier PC or in a old box and never look at them.  I have or had a half dozen relatives that would at every family gathering talk about old photos and how they should go through them.  Organize them and note who is in them.  Now 12 years on I have lost three of those (my mother and her sisters) so the knowledge is lost.  But the photos are still in a huge box in my storage closet.  And my three other relatives have never done a thing.

As an aside.  I happened to have the “family photo box” when my parents house burned down 13 years ago.  So my mother’s family photos survived the fire that claimed everything else she owned.  But I the only time anyone looked through this box was the day after my mother passed away when we were looking for photos of her to use at her funeral.  

What people say is they are going to organize this mess someday but the reality is that what they want is someone else to do the work for them so they can feel better about it.  They want it to be of value to someone but it is not realy of value to even them.

Our hobby is a bit odd in that we usually model stuff that is either hard to find, old or distant so we NEED photos to understand out prototype (even freelance modelers still refer to prototype photos for reference for inspiration). But this is more of a research library then a family photo album.

As for the security of cloud storage.  No it is not “safe”  for the various reasons noted.  Not the least being that most companies go out of business eventually even the largest companies.  But the cloud storage is not meant to be the permanent solution (thier is no permanent solution) it is meant to be the catastrophic solution.  That USB drive is great but if you house is hit by a fire it is no more safe then you pc itself.   That is why in general backups are viewed as follows 

in the PC

off the PC but in the same building 

located in another building (the farther away the better).

the concept is that no ONE single point of failior will destroy ALL copies.  

So if you computer fails you buy a new one and download from a backup.  If a backup fails you replace it and save a new backup from your pc.  If you loose you house or business you rebuild rebuy and download from your off site backup.

Ironicly my buddy lost his computer business to a fire that destroyed the building he had a unit in.  And had to rebuild and the pull everything from offsite backup.  It happens more often then you think.

-Doug M

Another thing to remember - make sure someone else knows

As for cloud storage, or any other password protected device:  Make sure your password(s) are also made known... Not to everyone, but to significant others. 

Is that email account holding a photo or other document?  What happens to it when something happens to you?  Lost forever?  Or is it retrievable?  And, how fast?

99.9% of all private uses

99.9% of all private uses will NEVER keep an off site backup, up to date.  The pita of backing it up and then taking it off site is just to much.

As for the cloud getting messed up then you creat a new backup from you PC.  That is why you keep three.  Because any one (or even 2) can get destroyed.

As for passing it on?  Who really would want it?  Unless you are talking financial info and I hope you document that better then just stuffed into a portable hard drive.

-Doug M

Missed some

Missed some:

- Alien abduction
- Asteroid strike
- EM pulse from solar flare
- Atomic war
- Sun goes nova
- Unexplained spontaneous combustion

Agreed on unreliable flash drives....

Whilst Flash (Thumb, USB...) Drives are cheap and have pretty decent storage capacity I think these are not suitable for backup tasks - alternates like portable HDDs and SSDs now at very affordable prices make the flash drive largely redundant and probably represent a safer alternative.

FWIW I believe any backup routine that requires human interaction after initial set up is bound to fail when its needed most. Now I'm not saying ONLY rely on cloud syncing, or TimeMachine, or event based software backups etc but if someone has to manually insert a device, startup the appropriate SW and press a button to back up most will go, "nah I'll do it tomorrow when I have a chance"  - this tomorrow often never comes till the failure they will probably endure and need that backup the most.

Whilst I am Mac based the following has comparable/similar solutions for the other platforms that people use. Lets not get to this is better than that type argument here please.

For automated backups in hourly increments I use TimeMachine writing to a local external Drive in Raid 1 config (or data written concurrently to both drives), the main SSD in my mac is synced to another HDD using a tool called ChronoSync (buy once and forever updated), this software has multiple tasks configured in a variety of ways. See image below. I also have a RAID 1 based NAS that has additional files written to it using same tool, and then depending on requirements some things (eg: JMRI roster, specific photos and general file sharing) via dropbox, and shared google sheets via google drive. In future I plan to migrate to a Raid 5 configuration NAS to further "protect" my data. This will happen when large SSD become affordable and can shift all secondary backups to a NAS using the current one as a backup repository for the main house NAS.

My biggest "problem" is most is on site, due to our currently below average ADSL speeds large cloud based backups are unusable at present but when faster connection to web becomes viable then this will be considered (privacy must also be factored into this decision too). To mitigate some of the dangers of all on site I have at least three copies of my most important data across different physical drives be it SSD, HDD or cloud but none rely on the relative unreliability of a flash drive (they are cheap for a reason) - YMMV

Another form of backup

Having multiple backups is good.  Offsite can be pretty easy if you have a friend you trust, or a lockable desk drawer at work.  But there is another form of backup worth mentioning...

Print the photos you really like and stick them in an album.  You may enjoy them more, and you won’t loose them if your backup strategy turns out to be flawed.  Print the critical bits of your financial records and stick them in a file cabinet.  Or a safe deposit box.

One point not mentioned too often is how are you going to use that backed up stuff.  Software has a relatively short lifespan.  I have documents written in some old word processor format that died off as MS word took over the world.  It’s not possible to read them with any software available today (at least not that I’m aware of) and due to some form run compression (disk space was tighter back then) it’s not even possible with a binary file dumper.  If it was super critical or valuable information I might be able to pay some service to extricate the info, but it’s not, it’s just notes about some train related stuff.  The point is, if you have information you really value, just backing up the files isn’t good enough, you need to make sure the files are in some format that is likely to be readable for a long time.  Like plain old text, pdf, jpeg.  Possibly MS Word, although I think there are early word formats that the latest word won’t read.

@Doug... but

As for passing things along - there is a point that Few people would have an interest in Everything you've put on the cloud...

From experience, it might have helped my family to have access to my deceased sister's LinkedIn and personal email accounts... she left precious little info re: her assets or intentions. 

I bring this up Not to hijack the thread into estate planning, but it will (for some, I dare say Many) intertwine.

Thus, think it over While you set up backups.

Off Site

A number of years ago I developed a strategy where I purchased 2 identical USB hard drives, I would make a backup on each and the take one of the hard drives to work with me and put it in the filing cabinet. Every month or so I would bring it home, make new backups and take one of them to work. That system worked well, at least so long as I remembered to do it and take one of the drives to work.

Since I have retired, I don’t have a place to take the second drive, plus file sizes have increased so the 500 GB drives won’t hold everything anymore! I started paying Google for some extra storage space in the Cloud, but I treat this as just another option that may or may not work when the time comes. I still think the portable hard drive is the most reliable except that if the house burns down it will be gone and the cloud backup would have to be used.

The biggest weakness is the human link, I am often remiss in not making timely backups, I do have some backups that are automated but I never check that it is working, and some of those rely on the computer being turned on late at night.

So, all these methods are flawed, but by having multiple methods I hope that one of them will work when the time comes!

Of course the long term issue is will someone 100 years from now be able to read these files? We have documents and paintings from the time of the ancient Egyptians that can be still be read today, but computer files and media from just 20 years ago that are not decipherable. Not that anyone would want to see my stuff! Mind you those pictures that we treasure now of old trains or street scenes were not thought to be of much value at the time either!