This is often a time of year when people do some spring cleaning. Of course it always too easy to delete something that you may need later so having a good backup strategy in place is strongly recommended.

I was reminded when I saw the article in Nature recently "11 ways to avert a data-storage disaster. Hard-drive failures are inevitable, but data loss doesn’t have to be" Link.

I have a couple of types of backup, an archive that stores critical versions of files, I have copies in Time Machine, an external server and I use Amazon WebServices to provide external storage.

The second runs every evening and generates a copy of the hard drives and stores then on Amazon WebServices

The final type is the every day stuff and for that I use Time Machine, this gives me virtually instant access to accidentally deleted/corrupted files, this is stored on an external Synology server.

I recently had to restore a machine from a backup and was delighted to be up and running in a couple of hours.