24-03-2020, 10:51 PM
Tony is quite right about the fragility of the WWW. It has turned into a wonderful resource, and a great many institutions and individuals have carried our scanning programmes making a huge amount of material and information accessible.
One of the mistakes that website owners (and people with many photographs or other saved material) make is not to keep off-line backups. It's all very well having a website or other material backed up on some remote server - but even that can fail. The trick, if you have a lot of data, is to employ two external hard drives and back up, manually, to each. Don't reply on automated backups; I've tried several and, guess what, they don't always work. Last year my web hosting company managed to loose over three-quarters of my site - and, naturally, they had no backup. However, with three offline copies available, it was soon restored.
Need a reliable external hard drive? I've found Western Digital "Elements" very satisfactory. I run them for three or four years and then retire them, just in case (though as an experiment, I kept one going for over six years I believe).
One of the mistakes that website owners (and people with many photographs or other saved material) make is not to keep off-line backups. It's all very well having a website or other material backed up on some remote server - but even that can fail. The trick, if you have a lot of data, is to employ two external hard drives and back up, manually, to each. Don't reply on automated backups; I've tried several and, guess what, they don't always work. Last year my web hosting company managed to loose over three-quarters of my site - and, naturally, they had no backup. However, with three offline copies available, it was soon restored.
Need a reliable external hard drive? I've found Western Digital "Elements" very satisfactory. I run them for three or four years and then retire them, just in case (though as an experiment, I kept one going for over six years I believe).