Best and Least Reliable Storage Methods?

I keep getting reminded of backing up my data when I hear stories of people's hard drives and other storage mediums suddenly failing and all of their data is gone. And then I forget all about it the next day.

I even hear of SSDs and some flash drives/memory dying suddenly.

I would like to know some of the best and worst mediums to store your data, how safe it really is. What are some good mediums to back-up data and keep it stored away safely?

Now I'm freaking out over my USB flash drive or HDD dying suddenly and being in big trouble.

 

The best strategy is to just get one external HDD (not SSD) and use it for nightly backups of a separate partition that has all your data on it. Get one several times larger than your data partition (I have a 100GB partition for data that goes to a 500GB backup drive) to allow for incremental/differential backup strategies. If you have the budget, you could consider getting two identical drives.

HDDs are always at risk of failure, so having multiple copies of all your data mitigates the risk. I usually make it a rule to always have the primary data load (all my data), and two backups. All on different drives. So I can survive two hard drive failures before I'm at risk of losing anything.

Just do not get those 'already-ready' RAID external drives...many of them do not work well. Just use your own two drives and have automated backups take care of it.

 

If it's not a big size data, online storage are sometime really useful too.

 

U could try RAID 1 or RAID 5: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID
Or get a SCSI Drive, their r built to last as they are deployed in srvrs.
My dad uses tapes in his company to archive, backup files: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tape_drive