Backups aren't simple. A common saying goes: "There are two types of people: those who have suffered a catastrophic loss of data, and those who will." Data loss happens more often than we'd hope, and most of us are unprepared.

I once had a similar experience. As a child, we moved family photos to an external hard drive. Later, my dad formatted it for a TV set-top box, wiping the index. It was a cheap lesson: never keep important things in one place. Drives die, get stolen, or bits rot.

So our first principle is to have a backup—a copy elsewhere. But that doesn't cover ransomware, accidental deletion, or catastrophic mistakes. Our backup shouldn't be a mirror; we need snapshots to go back in time. RAID 1 is out.

How often? Maybe weekly for photos. This is the Recovery Point Objective (RPO), ranging from <30 seconds for financial institutions to 24 hours for small enterprises. Snapshots increase storage burden, so rotate backups. Keep 14 days' worth, delete oldest, add new. But that requires vigilance—corruption might go unnoticed.