What is the best way to back up data and keep it for the rest of life?

^{BACK UP DATA}

^{What is the best way to back up data and keep it for the rest of life?}

  ^{Question can be understood in a few ways.}

  Surprisingly, even with our modern technology, paper is still the safest and most predictable way to back up all important data (with precise precautions).

   ^{During your lifetime, we have the great opportunity to store items in a completely different way.}

   ^{If you think there is a way to back up your data today and keep it on the same media until you die, there is probably no answer. Assuming you live a long and healthy life, the backup stored media may change.}

 ^{Cloud backups are also subject to companies that have been around for decades and should not be relied upon as your sole backup source.}

  ^{If you understand what the best backup strategy is to make sure you have reliable backup data in the future, I recommend here:}

  ^{Back up your data using a cloud backup service such as Backblaze or Crash Plan.}

  ^{Back up your most important data (which becomes a subset of all your data) using a personal cloud service such as Dropbox or iCloud.}

  Have a local hard drive that makes increasing backups per hour, daily and weekly. If you have a Mac, the time machine works wonderfully.

   ^{Have another local hard drive that you can clone to your hard drive using something like carbon copy cloner. Do this at least once a month, as often as possible.}

   ^{Backup data to optical disks that you no longer use on a daily basis. An example might be a project you worked on last year that you no longer need, but you should not delete.}

  ^{The point is, the media on which you back up your data will fail and become obsolete. Years ago people invested in tape backup drives.}     

  ^{You will never hear anyone use them today. People then backed up items on zip drives. Although you can still get a zip drive to work, it's not that easy. Eventually, CD, DVD and BluRay formats became obsolete and it became difficult to find a drive that could read disks.}

  ^{So at some point you need to copy all the data on obsolete (such as DVD or BluRay data disks) media and copy them to another. High capacity USB drives also have a limited lifespan (I think it's about 25 years, but I might be wrong). So having a reliable backup means that you will always continue to some extent.}

   ^{In addition to copying again, you need to switch to new technology to make sure you can still access the data.}

   ^{For example, USB-C is being phased out and I guess in a few years ordinary USB ports will be obsolete and today's flash drives will be obsolete. So you need to keep back in the data as long as possible.}

  ^{Overall, no system is perfect, but it should be very reliable and secure. Also, remember to migrate to a new storage format once the data returns to normal, keep checking the backup and replace the hard disk one by one.}

 ^{Additionally, SSDs are generally more reliable (but more expensive) than hard drives. It really depends on how much you can afford and how much data you want to store.}