How long to keep backups

⏱️ Having a regular backup system in place is critical. But then what? I'll look at how long you might want to keep those backups, why, and how long I keep mine.

How long to keep backups
- Most people should keep daily incremental backups plus a full monthly backup for three months.
- Keep backups long enough to recover from various problems, bearing in mind how quickly those problems might be detected.
- Backups made for different reasons may have different retention requirements.
- Businesses may be required to keep more backups for longer periods of time, depending on their industry.
- Special-purpose backups may have shorter or longer retention plans.

Chapters
0:00 How Long Should I Keep Backups
0:51 The default... When in doubt
1:35 Implications of how long you keep backups
2:03 Malware
3:26 Accidental deletion
4:24 File corruption
6:44 Types of backups
7:38 Safety Net
10:22 A rule of thumb

More Ask Leo!

#askleo #backups #drive

[askleonotenboom]

Dealing with accumulated data. It can really add up.

[aixtom]

One aspect that I also take into consideration: Offsite Backups, and access in real emergencies, like when you lose your entire house for example. I have two monthly data backup of "self-created" things (that can not be re-purchased or re-created in any practical way) on two drives that I put in my locker at work, and one pair of yearly Blu-Rays with scanned documents like insurance policies, certificates, health documents, etc.. that I hand over to two different relatives each Christmas.

[deepsouthwrestln]

I know this may be a little of off topic but I could not find a topic that really matched my question. I have lots of videos that I backup on multiple drives so I stand less of a chance of losing them. My question is why do some videos copy from one drive to another and play normally without any problems but the same video on another thumb drive that I am using for back up won't play and give me the dreaded 0xc00d36c4 error? These are new thumb drives I am copying them to. Most are new 1 or 2 TB SSD drives. It is driving me crazy. lol... they work on other SSD thumb drives and not on all of them, same goes for normal thumb drives. And they all work on the main backup drives that I am copying them from. If you have time to address this I would appreciate it. Or if you already have a video about this let me know which one it would be. Thank you very much.

[neuideas]

That motherboard looks like it may be buggy.

[jamesedwards]

Invest in buying hard drive every ten years.

When you do the calculations in terms of prices and capacity. It is worth it,

MicroSD and SD card readers are cheap. So are the cards, depending on your capacity.

[HoundDogMech]

Do the Monthly Full Image back ups allow me to replace my dying M.2 PCIe SSD with a complete bootable C:\ Drive. Operating System & programs included. If not what Does?