I just backup to an external drive once per week, rotating between two drives stored in different parts of the house (one in a box within a bug-out bag). Once per couple of months I rotate one of the drives off site. I’ve tested and documented the restore procedures, test the integrity of the backups as part of the automated process, which also reports on the health statistics of the drives.
I can afford to lose up to a week’s worth of updates at any given time, and expect to at some point. For especially valuable things I sometimes do a midweek backup. The worst-case scenario would be having my house completely destroyed without any chance to even grab the bug-out bag, during the same period as the off-site drive failing without notice. This combination is possible, but seems unlikely.
You can keep copies of passwords in the same locations as you keep cash, important documents, and other valuables. Don’t have just one copy, don’t keep them in the same place. You can obscure passwords in many different ways: just look at how many documents, receipts, cards, and similar have meaningless identifiers on them.
Total cost: About $600 over the past fifteen years for drives, some hours to refine the backup configuration, about 5 minutes per week of attention, and occasional updates when I rearrange my home network significantly.
I just backup to an external drive once per week, rotating between two drives stored in different parts of the house (one in a box within a bug-out bag). Once per couple of months I rotate one of the drives off site. I’ve tested and documented the restore procedures, test the integrity of the backups as part of the automated process, which also reports on the health statistics of the drives.
I can afford to lose up to a week’s worth of updates at any given time, and expect to at some point. For especially valuable things I sometimes do a midweek backup. The worst-case scenario would be having my house completely destroyed without any chance to even grab the bug-out bag, during the same period as the off-site drive failing without notice. This combination is possible, but seems unlikely.
You can keep copies of passwords in the same locations as you keep cash, important documents, and other valuables. Don’t have just one copy, don’t keep them in the same place. You can obscure passwords in many different ways: just look at how many documents, receipts, cards, and similar have meaningless identifiers on them.
Total cost: About $600 over the past fifteen years for drives, some hours to refine the backup configuration, about 5 minutes per week of attention, and occasional updates when I rearrange my home network significantly.