A few months ago, I bought and assembled a computer and some disk drives to create a home NAS device. My home storage was out of control, so the FreeNAS solution has been wonderful. I am still in the process of organizing all of my files making sure that I only have one copy of my files, but that is for another post. Actually, that would be boring.
Even though I have been in technology for many years, I never really had a personal storage strategy, and I would assume that not many people have put something like that together for their personal digital files. It’s just another thing to worry about. We just put all of our files that did not fit on our laptop on a 4 terabyte (Raid 1+0) disk drive. This drive contained photos, movies, document, and music. Loosing the data would be regretful, but to keep it in perspective, no one would die or anything. I would consider this lack of a strong backup strategy as "Backup Debt."
Two months ago, this same external disk drive overheated, and it did not work until it completely cooled down. It feel like it took a day or two to cool down. When it did start working again, I scrambled to try and backup all of the data on the drive using an online backup service. One hundred and seventy dollars later, all of the data on the disk was safely encrypted and stored on an online service.
I just wanted to share some of my decisions about how to preserve and manage your digital files. I have separated my digital files into 3 categories: files I don’t want to lose, files that I shouldn't lose, and files I don’t care about.