Backup
Whetever you know it or not: you need a solid backup strategy for all your data.
TL;DR1
Real men don’t take backups, but they cry a lot.
Problems you need protection from
Hard drive failure
Hard drive reliability
\[ AFR = 1 - e^{(-\frac{1year}{MTTF[h]})} = 1 - e^{(-\frac{8760h}{MTTF[h]})} \approx 0.00872 \]
\[ AFR[\%] = \frac{1year}{MTTF[h]} * 100 = \frac{8760h}{1 * 10^6h} \approx 0.876 \]
File server failure
Your house burning
Yourself
Hacking
Backup Strategies
To protect yourself from the problems above, you need more than one backup plan or strategy. You need a layered and combined strategy that protects you from all the different error mentioned above, if you want to keep all your images for as long as you live.
If you don’t have a good backup strategy implemented, I can promise you that it will end in tears.
RAID 5/6
Snapshots
External drives
Spare parts
Offsite copies
Summary

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TL;DR or TLDR is an acronym that stands for “Too Long Didn’t Read.” While originally the acronym was was an insult to criticize a piece of writing as overly long, tl;dr have now taken on a second meaning as a shorthand for a “summary,” frequently called the tl;dr version of a longer account or article. Like it is used here. ↩