Sorry to put another spanner in the works, but for those of us who don't do 'tech talk' - could you explain what some of those terms mean or are, Andrew, farmeroman and Guy ?
I agree that the discussion has gone wildly tech in just a few posts, but that's the nature of nerds
. However, hopefully some of us techies' paranoia about the threat of data loss has rubbed off on anyone reading this.
I think that the real message is take regular backups of anything that you would hate to lose, which I'm sure includes your photos (50.6GB/20,000 photos in my case), genealogy research data (10.6GB/6200 files and roughly 10 years of my life) and music (22GB/50,300 tracks), plus other important documents, etc.
NAS: Networked Attached Storage. It is a box containing or more disks which is connected to the network (e.g. into the back of a wifi router). It can be used as a backup device for one or more computers and the data can be shared between one or more computers. It can also be set as a personal cloud meaning that the data can be accessed anywhere there is an internet connection.
RAID/mirroring: Too techie for normal people to care about
.
Incremental backup: Software which recognises when a file is changed and backs it up to the relevant drive immediately or according to a schedule (daily in my case
) whilst also retaining a copy of the original file (I can go back several months to recover from mistakes).
Ransomware: A nasty piece of software which can be triggered by clicking on the attachment on an email purporting to be from a bank, etc. Your files are then encrypted and you can only get them back by paying the criminal a fee, in which case he may give you the key to decrypt it. Or not. Unfortunately it will encrpyt anything on the network which the computer has read/write access to, which may include other computers and NAS drives. Oh and don't leave your USB backup drives permanently connected as those will get encrypted too. That's why I also take a regular USB drive backup and remove it from the computer.
So, whatever method(s) you use, back it up, take it out and store it somewhere safe! But don't rely on a single copy on your computer's hard drive. It will fail eventually.