Hermanland

I am always searching for a safe backup media for my big collection of digital photo and scanned old films and their meta database.  Hard disk is a convenient backup media.  I use 2 external hard disks for backup purpose. They are only switched on when performing the backup.  This reduces the chance of virus infection and increases the operating life of the hardware.  I don’t use any RAID or JBOD housing, not even RAID 1 because of the problem of equipment compatibility.  If the RAID housing fails, I may need to find the same housing from the same brand to access the data in the hard disks.  I use a file synchronization software – Synkron to perform the backup manually.  I like Synkron because it is an open source software and it explains well the algorithum the software uses to detect collision and propagate deletion.  Synkron keeps track of the file changes since last synchronization using readable text file instead of any hidden binary file which is good.  Of course, Synkron provides me detail simulation report so that I know what will be backup before I shall actually do it.  After the backup, I also have a detail report to record the result of each backup session.  It seemed quite good until I realized hard disk is not completely trustable as a backup media.  The hardware can failed suddenly without any warning.  Hard disk being too easily rewrittable is suspectible to virus attack.  So, I add DVD as my second layer backup media.  My data may not be completely safe on DVD.  The optical media is suspectible to natural aging decay and scratch in normal usage.  So, I consider Securdisc which provides better data reliability via data reduntancy and data integrity checking via CRC checksum.  But all those media may gone if someone breaks in my premises.  So, I get my DVD backup offsite.  There is completely safe backup media or backup scheme.  Am I too crazy? or I am too worrying?