I have two digital collections I don't ever want to lose. One is my collection of digital photographs I've taken of my children since I got my digital camera last June. These are irreplaceable and I cherish each one. The second is my MP3 collection which has taken about eighteen months to get to this point. It's not just the files but the meta data embedded within that is now exactly to my liking. I employ a very strict back up strategy when it comes to these two collections.
For starters, both collections reside on two physical hard drives on my home PC. There's a copy on my primary drive and secondary drive. Hard drive failures happen and I'm ready. Next, I periodically back everything up on DVD and store the DVDs at an undisclosed location. If my home PC is stolen or destroyed, I can restore my new drive with the DVD back ups. In fact, I backed everything up earlier today. Finally, and this is a newly added component of my back up strategy, I'm going to keep a copy of these files on another PC that won't reside in the same building as my home computer. This is as insurance against the unliklihood that my home PC would disappear and the back up DVDs fail. Ya never know.
So, with a copy of every file on three different physical hard drives and two different PCs at two separate locations and another copy of every file on DVDs kept at yet another location, I sleep well at night.
