How does it fail: Usb stick

Small, cheap, easy to use and they can take much more of a beating than a harddrive. Their small size is their worst enemy: Forget it in your pocket when washing, sit on it, drop it into the toilet or just plain loose it. Simple stuff no technology can solve.

These small miracles are not everlasting. All flash circuits have a limited number of times you can write to them. The cheap ones the count is 100.000 times, the expensive ones it is 1.000.000 or a bit more. You might not use a flash drive so many times, but if you use it as a working drive, and a program saves changes to it a lot of times, it might eventually kill the drive.

Everything can fail

The most basic principle in making a good backup strategy is: Everything can fail.

Harddrives break down, DVDs are suddenly unreadable and the fancy "in the cloud" online backup company goes out of buisness.

Think this way: At any time there is a probabillity that a given data storage will fail you. When that happens it will take some time before you realise it, it will take some time to get a replacement storage and it will take some time to make a new backup.

Making your own backup strategy

Having read the previous posts, you know that one backup might not be enough. There are many ways to make backup and if you want to be well protected without paying too much, you must make a backup strategy for your situation.

In order to make a backup strategy you must know about different backup technologies, their price, ease of use and how they fails.

Then you must weight the pros and cons of each technology and make sure that the advantages of one technology will cover for the disadvantages of another. One technology might be fast and easy to use, but will not protect against a major disaster. That can be combined with one that takes more of your time, but can be applies less often, because a major disaster does not happen a lot.

Some of the upcoming posting will talk about such technologies, pros and cons.