![]() The beauty is that all the data is stored on your own machines, so the only limit on space is how much storage you have on your devices. I've written about BitTorrent Sync before. You can get the free client at, and install the software on most platforms, including headless on a server. If you have multiple computers, or a computer an a server, another live mirror option is to use BitTorrent Sync. Most have a small amount of storage for free and allow extra storage for a subscription fee. There are other Dropbox-like solutions, such as SugarSync, Box, Google Drive and so on. Unfortunately, in order to back up a significant amount of data, you have to pay annually for Dropbox storage. It's free for a small amount of storage (probably enough for a folder full of office documents), and it does file revisioning, which helps for accidental overwrites. ![]() My favorite commercial software for live mirroring is Dropbox. Some options do automatic versioning of files, which makes your data a little more secure, but for the most part, live mirrors protect you from hardware failure, but not human error. The problem with live mirrors is that if you accidentally save over a file, or inadvertently remove a file, those changes are synced and you lose all the copies of the data in real time. The minute you create or change a file, those changes are synced to your mirror. The great part about live backups is in the name they're live. Live copies of your data is a backup of sorts. And, that's where actual backup comes into play. Your data is safe only if there is more than one copy of if. But, don't stop with RAID and assume your data is safe. You should use RAID if possible to help prevent data loss resulting from failed hardware. The moral of the story is this: RAID is awesome. And since I didn't back it up, it's lost forever. Most of the data I lost was just digital backups of our DVDs and Blu-rays, but about 10GB of that data was home videos. As luck(?) would have it, a power fluctuation during a storm caused three hard drives in my array to fail at the same time, and I lost all 24TB of storage. Since that meant two drives could fail and I still wouldn't lose data, I didn't bother backing up my collection of videos, including irreplaceable home videos. I've been preaching it for years, but on my local NAS (Network Attached Storage) device, I implemented RAID 6. I personally learned the hard way that RAID is not the same as a backup. ![]() RAID 5 is awesome, but trust me, it's not foolproof.
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