Sonos Era 100 Review How to Download iOS 16.4 Save 55% on iPhone Cases How to Sign Up for Google's Bard Apple's AR/VR Headset VR for Therapy Clean These 9 Household Items Now Cultivate Your Happiness
Want CNET to notify you of price drops and the latest stories?
No, thank you
Accept

Redundancy: the backups of your backups

If you really want to sleep easy, the ultimate backup solution includes backups for your backups.

Now playing: Watch this: True redundancy: a backup for your backup
1:19

If you really want to sleep easy, the ultimate backup solution includes backups for your backups.

The first steps in getting properly backed up are the big ones. Getting a real backup in place, making it happen automatically and making sure it works. All the keys to a happy and successful backup recipe.

Once you're well in order, there's one more step you can take to really rest easy and that's setting up additional redundancy — basically a backup for your backup!

I have a personal example — my family photo archives. I never want to feel the pain of losing my digital memories, so I run multiple backups.

I have a local archive on my main computer, which is automatically backed up to network-attached storage in my home. That backup is then further backed up to the cloud using a tool called Jungle Disk, which sends it all to Amazon S3. I also have a live accessible online backup that lives at SmugMug, which lets me share photos with friends online while also acting as a full backup of my local archives. And I've even got the extra security that SmugMug runs its own backups.

Overall, that's a count of four full backups of my photos — not including my main archive (because remember, an archive is not a backup).

Once you have that kind of redundant backup in place and know your digital life is incredibly safe from loss, you'll sleep better than you ever have before.