Managing data

I’m a worried man… I know it’s hard to believe, but I am. What are you worried about I hear you say. My electronic data or course. I’ve recently realised just how much data there is and how important it’s become. I’ve got data relating to work, finance, friends, family, music and images all of which is extremely important to my continuing well being.

I run a small network at home with all of these data on a single drive sitting inside a Synology DS-101g+ NAS. There’s an old 80GB external USB hard drive attached to it, onto which the NAS content is incrementally backed up at night.

The Synology NAS has been great since is replaced a Linux server when the cooling fans failed. However, that incident coupled with a laptop drive crash has got me wondering whether my current approach is good enough. After all, can I afford to lose the data I’ve created between the daily backup and what if the house burned down? On top of this, the last time my server lost a fan I couldn’t access my files and why are these things always a non-standard, hard to get sizes?

So I’m wondering whether to take the following steps:

<ul>
    <li>Set up a Synology DS-106, the 101g+ has been replaced, as my primary file server.</li>
    <li>Configure the new <abbr title="Network Attached Storage">NAS</abbr> to backup to the old one each night, providing redundancy.</li>
    <li>Make regular copies of all the files on DVD-R, storing them in a fireproof safe or a remote self storage locker.</li>
    <li>Consider secure online storage for critical files only as it&#8217;s not cheap, but could be configured to back them up whenever they change.</li>
</ul>

The problems are that a failure between backups could lose me a days work and finding an online backup service for a networked Mac is not as easy as it should be. With reference to the former, if I was producing a lot of commercial data I’d install a good RAID system. As for the latter, they’re all promising to have Windows and Mac support soon, honest.

I don’t bother backing up the individual machines, a Mac mini and a Windows laptop, because I enjoy spending a whole day rebuilding them if something goes wrong. A cloned copy of these drives might be a worthwhile exercise, even if it isn’t kept totally up to date.

All this is telling me to spend some money, but will I get away with it??