Many years ago, back in the early Windows XP days, I was burned once when my PC's hard drive failed on me. Of course, only after I had lost some files, after reports need to be rewritten, and after my personal family photos were irrecoverable did I make it a point to be meticulous about my own data storage and data recovery protocol.Anyone who knows me knows about my plethora of external hard drives that sit on my desk at school, in addition to the Drobo sitting at home, and other miscellaneous hard drives and flash drives. I have calculated that I have about 7.5 TB of storage that is readily accessible to me, 6 of which are for archiving and backing-up.
From my experience, I believe the best and most comprehensive back-up procedure is one that's: (1) redundant, (2) easily accessible, (3) offsite, and (4) automatic. If any of the four is not fulfilled, then the system is merely superficial and cannot protect against most practical cases.
I am guilty of not fully satisfying (3), i.e. if my house blew up one day (knock on particle board), I would lose about 90% of my digital life. And apparently, my (4) isn't as automatic as it could've been.
Last night, while copying from the external hard drive with my most precious data (the silver one) to my 4 TB Drobo, the external hard drive suddenly failed on me, right as I was transferring several GB of digital photos. How's that for irony? I know have digital photos that I will likely not recover. I know I lost a few miscellaneous video files. But I know that my school documents are safe (absolutely always backed up in several places at any one time since it IS my bread and butter). Still, I am not completely certain what else is lost.
All I can say is, @#$%. Geez.