[Z-man]

Regarding the external hard drives & USB connected TB drives: they eventually do go bad. Build into your backup methodology a hardware refresh at least once every 2 years.

if you are serious about your data, you may want to consider a raid solution on your active/live data: this uses more disks, but if one of the drive drives fail, the system can automatically rebuild the data based on parity logic. The rebuild time is relatively short - minutes vs. the days it may take to recover from a complete single hardrive failure.

Disaster Recovery is a huge and growing business. But with new technologies, the old Tape and truck backup method (equivalent to Blue-Ray and offsite storage) method is often too slow.

I am not a big fan of online backup services. Once your data hits the cloud, it can be open to more vulnerabilities. Yeah, the cloud has been deemed "safe" but it is a public cloud. Private clouds help make things more secure, but now you need to maintain the cloud, and that can get costly.

My suggestion for you would be to create a small "active/active" or "active/passive" environment. Designate two sites in your infrastructure - maybe your home and your office. The establish a "VPN" network (Virtual Private Network) between the two sites. Many companies have software that can do this. Once you have a VPN connection, you can safely suffle data back and forth between the two sites.

Next, you can get software to manage the dataflow -- either daily 'pushes' of data from one site to the other: full backups or incremental backups - at least nightly - done during off-hours to minimize disruption. (I would suggest a weekly full system backup with daily incrementals) Or another option is realtime online syncing of data. The cost factor is mainly in the 'pipe' ie: what type of bandwidth you have between the two sites.

All this hardware, software, and bandwidth sound expensive, but it is not that bad -- consider these factors:
1. If you loose everything, how much will that cost you?
2. If you only have backups to a hard drive or DVD's, can you afford the downtime while you recover everything? Your time to recover includes purchasing new hardware (new PC/laptop), configuring that hardware, transferring the data, and bringing the systems back up.

Treat Disaster Recovery as an insurance policy: you gotta spend $$ on it, but you hope never to have to use it! But if you do have to use it, you get what you pay for!

-Z-man.