If there aren’t two copies in separate places, it isn’t a backup!

A short while ago I was reading some poor guy’s blistering rant of how his Drobo died, taking about a terabyte of data with it. It’s a tragic situation,  and your heart goes out to the fellow. 

Don’t be that guy!

The Drobo is one of the most talked about external storage devices, boasting an amazing ability to juggle the bytes among multiple hard drives and seamlessly recover from a total disk failure of any one of those drives. You can even yank a drive out while it is running and the machine will still recover.

But it isn’t a backup solution if the data is nowhere else.

What if you have a virus that erases the device? What if someone steals your Drobo?

Hardware devices such as this are part of a backup strategy but they are not a backup strategy by themselves. The same goes for using different folders or even different partitions on a large hard drive to serve as a pseudo backup. At least, make sure the data is on two different physical hard drives inside your machine before you consider the job done.

In my mind, your backups should be physically and electronically separated from the source data. Physical separation keeps a single head crash from taking out all of your copies. Electronic separation helps prevent accidental deletion of both at once. Don’t lose your life’s memories!