Why Ts Rocks!

True... but writing to my server at 200MB/sec is a lot faster than uploading via a DSL internet connection... even a fast one... most UK ISP services offer tragic upload speeds compared to the download speeds. Uploading even a couple of terrabytes, even at what is considered to be "fast" by UK standards takes days. In the UK even 100mbits/sec is regarded as fast... that's a little under 10megaBYTES per second... and most people's upload speeds are a fraction of that.

 

I'm a network engineer by trade... The thing with these systems that causes issues is when people are trying to share files via online storage rather than share via a local server and use cloud as a backup.
In the example you use I would likely take a USB backup of the data and use my home internet to upload. Unless they need direct instant access to the cloud from the moment my setup starts working, it's usually fine.

 

Always a possibility. Keeping 13TB in the cloud will be expensive though. It woudl be nice to have as yet another layer of protection, but to be honest... 4 local backs up... 2 of them using redundant systems and enterprise grade drives.... one of them in a separate building and running a UNIX based OS is probably good enough

 

13TB? Sod that... If I had to build these back ups again, it would take an age over my 2.5Gbit ethernet let alone over the internet. I think I have it covered as it is: Main machine > local back up in machine> RAID with hot spare>RAID with hot spare in separate building using a non windows OS.


I agree that the average bloke in the street is better served by cloud storage though.

 

Although it doesn't apply to TS, as it can be redownloaded and all...
Sure, the most likely issue is a disk getting old, and failing. So a random local backup should help. Fortunately, it didn't happen yet either.
The next issue is a power surge, be it during an outage, a lightning strike, or an alien flying by. Either way, likely the majority of the devices go kaputt. Offline ones have a really good (99%+) chance of survival, though.
The last issue is a major incident - your house burns down, or an earthquake squashes stuff.
So the most important things - photos, music collection, documents, memories - are best kept off-site offline. You can keep it at a friend, and keep two disks in rotation. (You go home, start the backup, go sleep, and a power surge happens. Grats, you didn't actually have an offline, off-site backup.)
For half-laugh, I'd add that in case you need to abandon the country due to a random war, or something like a nuclear incident, the off-site backup should be stored off-continent. ;-D For the regular guy, using 2-3 clouds is the best substitute (you may lose access to the one where you live). For Edward Snowden, it's friends.

 

Stuff off steam is easy, sure... even JT and AP is relatively pain free... but seriously... I've got hundreds of addons from third parties that came from places like ATS, DPS or UKTS et al. Tracking down all that stuff again would be so demoralising I'd probably give up. I'd probably not even be able to remember what I had. It woudl take MONTHS to get everything back as it was.

Backing up TS is easy... You just drag a copy of Railworks to another device. Easy. This thread seems to be about how to then protect that back up... or at least turned into that... and yes.... I know... that was my fault LOL

 

That would do it for most instances of failure, access, malware etc

 

I think there's a lot of catastrophizing going on here. Everybody has to decide what risks they'll accept, but the reality is that loss due to theft is rare and fire very rare. Loss of data through user error or equipment failure is more common and an external or duplicate drive will take care of that quite easily.

 

As soon as aliens and earthquakes enter the conversation, yes LOL. If you live in Japan or California, sure... earthquake may be a factor. I think I'm safe up here in Blackpool

 

One of the main reasons I keep my old installers is people like to "update" their scenarios to use the latest and greatest of their own addons, hence you need to keep up with their products to keep using their runs (AP are one of the 3rd parties that do this repeatedly)
SO I have a few "generations" of content that's no longer available because it's been "updated"

 

Depends where you live LOL

 

Yes, a daily automated "ROBOCOPY source target /MIR" does it.
Either RailWorks or the installers.
Everything else depends on how critical it is, etc.

 

Careful with mirroring... if you accidentally delete something from source, and fail to realise, then it will deleted from destination. Back up is more failsafe... and every once in a while if everything is still OK... do a mirror to stop it getting bloaty.

 

Aha you never know, there was an earthquake up the road from me in Dudley a few years ago, don't think it caused any destruction although it is hard to tell the difference there! It shook me out of bed and caused ornaments to rattle.. I think we are safe from a destructive one though!

 

LOL

 

Getting even further OT, I learned the hard way as a student to disable the Autosave feature on Microsoft Word and change it to back up, after I accidentally deleted a large segment of text and autosave kicked in. In those days I think undo covered only one step back, and I’d typed some other things too.