I've been around computers long enough to know that you can't be paranoid enough when it comes to backing up your data. Over the years, I've had cassette tapes crap out, floppy disks flop, hard disks go soft, and hard drives seize up like an old Studebaker. Hell, I've even lost lines of programming code on tractor-fed printout paper that had the ink fade into nothingness. Now, with all the irreplaceable data I have now, you better believe I have redundancies in place, and redundancies for those redundancies, so that if worse comes to worse, I have data recovery solutions that will keep me protected, even if I lose my main and my secondary data sources.

A long time ago, I learned about raid systems, and their wonderful way of sharing information so that if you lost one of your hard drives in your cluster, you would still be able save your data through striping and parity, and other clever data storage techniques. However, there was never a good contingency in place when two hard drives would fail at the same time, and so initiating a raid recovery became a trickier process. However, luckily there are Raid data recovery specialists available that can restore and recover "crashed" hard drive data, so that you don't have to worry about losing another bit or a byte.

As for me, I'm still going to be keeping backed-up drives in secret underground locations, copies of important data in filing cabinets, safe deposit boxes, and underneath my parents stairs. If they made hardware that could last as long as the pyramids, we wouldn't need to spend as much energy on data storage, back-up, and recovery, but you have to remember that even the pyramids have lost a lot of data off of their surfaces. So I'm going to continue to be overly protective.

Yes, it's a lot of work saving, copying, and backing-up, but I can tell you how much it's worth it, only if to keep you from being around me when there isn't a reliable data recovery back-up plan in place.