Ken Blake wrote:

The biggest problem with backup is that I have been burned by backing up to
HDD, which are sort of like having a battery backup to a battery, where
both suffer the same failings under the same conditions.


Were you burned by having backed up to an *internal* HD? As far as I'm
concerned, that's better than no backup at all, but just barely.

I have never backed up to an /internal/ HDD, where I've been burned aplenty
by backing up to strange media (e.g., ZIP drives of the past) and to
removable media (e.g., USB sticks and USB drives) which tend to corrupt
themselves on Windows if you simply look at them askance.

Both
the original and the backup are vulnerable to simultaneous loss by
user error, nearby lightning strike, virus attack, even theft of the
computer.

Theft and lightning aren't a problem here in the hills above the Silicon
Valley, but a virus could easily be a problem with an internal HDD.

So I like to backup to DVD, which has the main problem of data being larger
than 4.7 GB in toto.

DVDs are external media, so they are better than an internal hard
drive, but they are very vulnerable to failure. As far as I'm
concerned, much better is one or more external hard drives;
alternating between two is great.

What I like about DVD is that it doesn't require power to work, where the
power connectors of some of my HDDs (the older ones) is a PITA to
reproduce. Sure, I could disassemble the case and see what's inside and
then use the SATA/PATA/IDE to USB, but that still doesn't negate the fact
that Windows eats up the file system when/if you unplug it in a way that
Windows doesn't like (ask me how I know this).

If SSD gets to the price of DVD, that would be the next option, I would
think. One problem with bulk DVDs is that Costco doesn't sell the stack of
100 anymore... Sigh.