Already covered above, but...in increasingly complex solutions
- Backup regularly. Plenty of tools around to do it. On Apple Macs it’s built in. You can backup to the same drive but that’s of limited benefit.
- Use a NAS (always on Network Attached Storage). Combined with backup tools you have independent and automated backups. Better than remembering to backup because you won’t until the very second you wished you had. These drives can be used for backing up devices too.
- Use a NAS with mirrored drives. It will maintain copies of its own data. Should one drive fail, it can recreate the duplicate copy itself when the faulty drive is replaced.
- Use a further NAS as a second backup located somewhere different at home. This protects you in the case of fire, water damage or theft.
- Use backup tools to keep the primary NAS and the backup synced.
- Put the second NAS in a different location - eg relatives house for safe keeping.
- Put the second NAS on-line at a different location and use a VPN and backup software to keep them synchronised. Secure and bomb proof and entirely under your control.
- Hot swappable RAID arrays are probably overkill for home use
Use cloud based services. Great service but can be limited on space (I have 12Tbyte of on-line storage
and another 6Tbyte offline
). For accessing files from any device at any location they are fabulous.
Potential issues around security of that data. Real big issues if it isn’t you needing to get at it! That is, who owns that data. Families have lost access to photos of loved ones because they have no legal right of access.
As far as losing files...
It’s highly unlikely the file itself is truly lost. It’s just the pointers to the data is corrupt. That’s like the index to pages in a book. The pages are still there but you don’t know where specific things are. Find the start of a subject though (a particular file) you can then start to read again. This is what file data recovery does and is very effective.
You can more often than not, recover data. That is until you write something else. There’s risk that the data itself gets overwritten. If you know you must get data back then do not use your computer (or that disk-drive) until you’ve recovered what you need. Don’t even be tempted..... do not boot from that drive. Take it out and analyse it on another machine (or boot from a USB images.
Backup strategies can be confusing and difficult to set up. Most people may only use a small amount of data. It isn’t hard to do.
You can protect yourself to a degree by using a large SD card and set up a daily backup of specific files or folders. Quick, simple and cheap. But, it won’t protect you against catastrophic loss such as theft, fire etc.
If you want to backup music for example, you need bigger storage.
An external portable USB drive will help. Easy to use. Can be set up to backup any changes as soon as it is plugged in.
Can be kept and storedseparate from your computer.
I would see a USB drive preferably kept somewhere completely different to store your photos. These are your memories and worth far more to you than £50 for the drive. This would be my minimum for some files.
Apple has integrated tools in iCloud and Timemachine. Easy as pie to use. I can go back years to virtually any previous version of any file with TimeMachine. Of course, you pay more for that degree of functionality. But, IMHO, it’s worth it. Windows by comparison you need an IT degree.
