What is your main backup method?

[NumberOneSpinelApologist]

Title. What do you use to back up your data?
Do you use physical media that you own, or someone else's computer, AKA "the cloud"? Or maybe you have some more elaborate setup?
Which utilities do you use to do the back up?
How many backups do you keep?
Where do you keep them? If you keep them in a super secret vault somewhere around the North Pole, what is the password to the safe? /jk you probably should not actually answer this question

 

[Freckles]

HDD with uncooperative link cable

there's a mix of things I wouldn't mind losing (because game mods become outdated, saves from old playthroughs stop mattering) and actually important things (audio, video, pictures—especially when they turn out to not exist online anymore)

I draw on paper so my art doesn't actually need this kind of backup, and I've not yet written anything I'd actually care to backup so far... or reread again once I'm done writing it, for that matter

 

[staticmoth]

I do a mix of cloud backups and backups to my desktop hard drive.

if the cloud its always good to have as its automatic and i don't need to think about it too hard. however, i need to initiate the backup to my hard drive myself so i've gotten into the habit of doing so every week when i'm off. (for reference: my ipad is about 200GB/1TB so these backups are huge.

i should probably invest in getting an external hard drive as well, sooner then later.

from my archivist training, don't count out paper. paper backups are extremely valuable. digitization is extremely fragile so having those physical backups are important!! magnetic tapes are also good, but be wary of rot and making sure its kept a controlled environment. same for floppies and cds/dvds.

 

[NumberOneSpinelApologist]

paper backups are extremely valuable.

That is true.
But while I could print out my shitty fanfics,
I can not print out my Sims save files with all my houses in there lol xD
Tapes are very interesting as supposedly they are more long lived, I keep thinking that I should learn more about it but then I forget to do that

 

[staticmoth]

Tapes are very interesting as supposedly they are more long lived, I keep thinking that I should learn more about it but then I forget to do that

tapes are far sturdier of a medium then say cd/dvd. certainly cd/dvd are cheaper to produce and hold a lot more storage, but the quality of tape is kind of understated!! you just gotta keep good care of them.

 

[colours]

i have a 2tb ssd that i was originally intending to be exclusively for my steam games, but honestly i might as well use it to back up my data as well, considering it's highly likely i'm getting another desktop later this year.

 

[Archaic]

I have a Synology NAS with two 12TB drives, setup so that each drive is a full replica. So if one drive dies for whatever reason, I still have a second drive with everything on it.

For Bulba stuff specifically, we have a Nextcloud instance that is used to backup Bulba stuff to the cloud. Not everything is there yet (like all the old backups from the mid-2000s that I found on discs not long before we moved), but a lot is, and it ensures that even if my local computers all died (in a natural disaster, or whatever), there wouldn't be any significant disruption for Bulba.

 

[phantomness]

I just have two HDDs with the absolute most important stuff on them that I back up regularly. If I tried to print out all my fanfics I would kill way too many trees... Some of my older stuff IS backed up to DVD, but I don't really have a CD/DVD reader setup anymore.

 

[JacobChu]

Backups? What backups?