A lesson for the unwary

Those of you who know the Gorse Fox will know his paranoia regarding backups. Indeed he has a document that defines his home backup strategy.

This morning it looks like one of his hard drives has failed. It will ping, but nothing seems to be able to access its files. Fortunately this is his secondary backup... and so he is still covered whilst he sources a replacement or finds some way to fix the drive.

Simply put, his strategy is:

• Create files on whatever computer or tablet you are using
• Back them up to a local shared drive (Network Attached Storage, in GF's case) - this is the primary backup.
• Backup the primary backup to a second local shared drive (again a NAS) - this is the secondary backup
• Finally, back up the files to storage on the web (Cloud storage from Google, Amazon, or some other reputable supplier).

All these backups are performed automatically. GF only has to intervene if something goes wrong... which is how he found out about today's problem.

To solve the problem, all he has to do (in the worst case) is to replace the drive and restart the backup process.

So, if you don't have backups YOU SHOULD
If you only have a single local backup, IT'S NOT ENOUGH