The Tao of Backup

This is a great way of learning the 7 lessons to reliable backups (just ignore the tiny amount of outdated advertising).

http://www.taobackup.com/

1. Coverage — Backup everything you can
2. Frequency — Backup as often as you are making changes
3. Separation — Geographically redundant storage (hint : if you don’t have 3 copies of the data in at least 2 locations then your data might as well not exist).
4. History — Versioning/snapshots of data changes over time. This helps recover from corruption, virus infiltration and PEBKAC.
5. Testing — If you haven’t tested your backups then Murphy’s law says they will likely fail when you need them the most.
6. Security — If I want to hack you, I’ll go for your unsecured backups.
7. Integrity — If your original data has been corrupting without you knowing then your copies of it are useless.