Pretty sure it's going to vary from person to person, but I have a LOT of digital media, mostly from my photography and videography, and to me archiving is still online, just on the big slow NAS (relatively speaking, it's actually pretty snappy) instead of the fast DAS, whereas "backed" up is a cold, offline storage medium, one copy of which is held off-site. The latter for me are external USB3 HDDs which get replaced every few years, because that's still cheaper than tape, faster than tape, and ensures that I have to re-verify (and occassionally prune) the data when I move it to a new set of drives (I have a few extra steps in the process to avoid fat-finger problems and so on than just copying the data over, and so far haven't lost a single file).

I use OSX's Time Machine to a local network drive, and I love it.

But I also want to do something offsite, and I haven't figured that part out, yet.

Glad to see Lady Fortune is getting some attention! Somehow it seems like she should be part of any back up solution. Archiving too.

Twenty years ago, I began saving videos and clips that I downloaded from the Internet. Back then, dial-up modems and crappy video codecs meant that anything you downloaded took days and was a great accomplishment once successfully transferred. Obviously, I wanted to save the downloads, so I started looking for archiving options.

Hard drives back then where far too small, so I started to burn the videos off to CD media. The blank CDRs where cheap and could be bought by the spindle. A few years later, DVD burners became available and were a welcome upgrade (1 DVD could hold about 7 CDs worth of data) All in all, I burned approximately 600 CDs and 400 DVDs. Many of the CDs have started to deteriorate - the thin foil on the top of the disk just flakes off. The DVD media has protective plastic layers on both sides and have endured a little better, but read errors still occur on all of these 10+ year old optical disks.

Spinning 3.5" hard drives are the new best bet for large archives. I could store an entire spindle-worth of CDR disks on a single large capacity hard drive. Of course, loosing one of these hard drives to a failure made relying on a single copy a significant risk. Nearly 100% of all hard drives (around 20 drives) that I purchased with capacities between 80GB and 1TB failed within 5 years. I recovered from nearly all failures by simply storing 2 copies of all the data. Each drive was purchased in pairs - one drive as the master while the other was an offline full copy backup.

I tried creating large arrays of hard drives, but there are significant limitations and costs to doing this in a single system. After experimenting with a number of different setups with large 3ware raid cards as well smaller consumer raid cards, I've come to the conclusion that an ideal system should not include more than about 8 hard drives per computer. Trying to find which "bad disk" is spewing SATA errors to the console in a 16 drive array is just not fun. Scaling storage beyond 8 drives should involve a second computer and a network filesystem over Ethernet.

But what if you don't need all of the data online all the time? Instead of keeping all the disks spinning all the time, why not place the drives into external USB enclosures and only turn them on when needed? This system worked great for me - up to about 20 drives. You see, USB doesn't have enough power to run a 3.5" hard drive. So 20 external USB enclosures + 20 wall wart power adapters + 20 power cables + 20 USB cables + daisy chaining multiple USB hubs and their associated power adapters = one giant rats nest of wires. I tried to salvage this system with a custom made wooden cabinet with 18 front mounted switches, an series of internal USB hubs, and individual cubby-holes for each drive. It worked, but the low speed of USB2 (less than 20MB/s) as well as incompatibility of the external USB enclosures on drives larger than 2TB has caused me to abandon this system.

My latest attempt at archival is simply storing caddy-less hard drives on the shelf. It's so simple, I have to wonder why I bothered with any of the other approaches. Now that hard drives have ditched the IDE ribbon cable for SATA connectors, a new breed of USB enclosures have sprung up. These devices are USB3 (nearly as fast as the drive itself), can easily be upgraded (to support multi-terabyte drives), and simply accept a bare drive into its slot at the top of the unit. Increasing storage capacity is simply a matter of buying another drive or two. I did, however, end up purchasing several dozen hard drive sleeves (just a few dollars each) to protect the drives from dust and minor vibrations while on the shelf.

I'm pretty judicious about what I keep, but I've still got stuff i'd hate to lose: scanned versions of all important documents in case of fire (birth certificate, marriage license, passports, etc.), the full manuscripts to seven editions of three books I've written, offsite backups of my websites and their databases (in case of disaster on those servers), and some correspondence, plus every resume I've ever produced. But the biggest treasure is my photo collection - I went full digital in about 2005 and scanned all my old physical photos and then destroyed the originals. On the same list goes old genealogical pics I've scanned and incorporated into a family tree book, and some other basically priceless stuff. I'm at about 200G of data, I think.

I do monthly CD or DVD burns, each starting with the present and going back as far as the medium will reach, so each disk overlaps the previous by a stretch, allowing for multiple copies of that stuff in the middle. Once a year I take the disks to my folks' place for offsite storage. I know CDs and DVDs have a shelf life too, but it's better than nothing. I also religiously backup my machines to external hard drives - the Mac is the "official storage place" for all important data, so it's the device I'd grab if I had to quickly abandon the house, or something. I back up twice to two separate external USB drives, and store the two drives in different locations.

But I just got a NAS, and that's forcing me to change everything. First of all I've added a lot of ISOs and MKV video and so on - I've decided not to back any of it up. If I lose my movie collection, who cares? But now the NAS is the central, official repository for everything I have in digital form. It's FreeNAS with 4, 1TB WesternDigital Red drives in a RAID-Z formation. And I'm experimenting now with how to back up what's on the NAS. Pulling data off the NAS over my network to, say, the Mac, where I replicate it to an external USB drive is turning out to be slow given my crappy router and wireless network. I'm experimenting with mounting the external drives to the NAS itself and running a cron script that mounts the drive, rsyncs the data, and then unmounts. Then I just have to remember to attach a drive every Sunday evening at 5PM or something like that.

I'm lastly tempted to get an account with something like rsync.net or something to automatically rsync to an offsite server. But I'm feeling too cheap to pay a monthly fee for the service and kind of reticent to put stuff like my passport scans on someone else's server. And the price per gig for offsite storage of my photos, for example, is a bit much.

Still experimenting here, but in the mean time I still plan on burning monthly disks. They've saved my bacon on many, many occasions!

I don't really use a computer at home; I have kids so have little tree time meaning most of my "computer" use is actually just using a smartphone or tablet.

As I have kids I have a lot of photos and videos, taken from my phone and backed up online automatically. Occasional I copy them over to a netbook to free up space on the device.