Another new backup regimen, 4.33 years later

It’s been a while since I last wrote about my backup regimen. Having suffered countless hard drive failures and episodes of mysterious filesystem corruption over the years, I’d learnt to approach the subject of backups fairly obsessively.

At its height, I backed up not only to external drives four times per day, but went so far as to burn an encrypted DVD of my home directory every single day. Nowadays, my sole machine is a MacBook Air (without a DVD burner), and while I continue to maintain a bootable backup on an external drive using the ever-reliable SuperDuper!, the rest of my backups are now living on the cloud.

Years ago I never would have considered entrusting my backups to a third party. But Amazon S3 is cheap, and it’s insanely durable: 99.999999999% durable. The odds of Amazon losing my data or going out of business are so minuscule that I would be perfectly happy to entrust not only my backups, but the sole originals to them as well. (The day Amazon loses my data is the day I’ll have a chuckle at the universe for playing silly tricks on me, and then proceed to become a turnip farmer.)

The only thing I need now is a couple of USB sticks with redundant, encrypted copies of my Amazon access credentials. (Up until a few weeks ago I had exactly that, but my last stick died and it’s time to get a couple of replacements.)