Over the last couple of years I have begun storing more and more data on my computers, I regularly perform a backup of files and full system images every month. I currently store my backups on two 1.5TB and a 400gb external hard drive, you may say that storing backup data on that amount of hard drives is obsessive however I beg to differ. What if one hard drive fails? or if another is damaged because of a fire or theft? at least then I will have other hard drives in which my data is safe.

Recently though I have been thinking of other ways to store my backups. Currently I keep the two 1.5TB drives in my home and the 400GB drive is kept in the garage, not so good if my property gets burgled. Therefore I was considering paying for a small-self store locker or online storage, although with self-storage costs starting around £20 a month and online storage around £10 a month that was a little out of my price range. And how could I trust someone else with the keys to my data?

After reading an article online titled " How to Get Easy Offsite Backup On a Budget " by John C. Dvorak, he stated his backup solution was just to have a couple of external hard drives in the back of his car. This got me thinking further; why shouldn't I just do the same thing? It was a simple enough task, all I had to do was purchase a 1TB 2.5″ SATA drive then keep it somewhere safe in the car so it wouldn't rattle around or be visible to passers by.

And that was exactly what I did. I also decided to get hold of a small plastic case to keep the drive in, then an anti-static bag to wrap the hard drive. This has been my backup process for around a year now and during that time I haven't experienced any issues, currently I have four external hard drives to backup to; each drive has Serpent-Twofish-AES encryption on a TrueCrypt container file.

The only decide to having four backup drives is the time it takes to backup each one, although if that is the price I have to pay to keep my data secure and safe then I don't mind that.