[Daniel] Backups

Backups are getting harder and harder as the years go by. Clearly, I am not the only one with this issue. When I got my first computer of my own in 2000, I never bothered with backups. The only things I had on the computer were games and music, all of which could be easily recovered. The first two years of college generated a fair amount of code and Word documents of papers for classes. Now backups took one CD and I could burn to the disc more than once.



2002 hit and we got our first digital camera, thanks to some wonderful friends and family. We had pictures to backup, along with all of Moriah's college related files as well. Now more than one CD but less than 5 so it wasn't a real big deal but an annoyance. Last year, we picked up a DV camcorder. As of writing, we have over 40Gb of personal data, virtually all of it unrecoverable if our apartment were hit by a fire or some other diasterous occurance. Both of our home directories fit on a DVD and all of our pictures fit on another. We're forced to retain our video on the original tapes, which we soon won't have much more room for.



The computing world is not prepared for the amount of media people will generate in the coming years. While I love all the digital media I can create and toy with now, I have absolutely no clue how I'm going to maintain all of this for the next 50 years. No storage media out there right now can do this (with perhaps the exception of tapes that may make it into that range). So either I continually backup the already backed up data on new media/formats as they come along or I find a solution. Neither will be cheap and I have no answers at this time.



Of course, all of this was prompted by the backup process run today. Another 4 hours down the drain.