The house and interior walls are all brick and masonry, it won't burn down, valuables are in a fire safe in any case. The lake I live next to is now at the highest level since 1910. It's been rising at the rate of about one centimeter a day for the past three months. If it rises another six feet it'll ruin my garden but I'll have six months warning to put my computer on a higher shelf. My house is surrounded by 60-foot tall trees, and my roof-top solar panels are very well grounded, so lightning doesn't scare me. Burglary? That's why I keep a last-ditch emergency backup set off premises.

The time I have to spend maintaining this kludge of a backup system? On average about one minute per week, with maybe a four times a year exception when I retrieve and update the off-premises backups at a cost of 10 minutes of my time. Meanwhile, should I accidentally delete or damage a file, I can recover its backup with a few mouse clicks without loading any recovery software and drilling down through 20 different versions that were saved incrementally to find the one that I want.

Understand that this system would not be workable for someone whose data is valuable and time-critical so that daily or even more frequent backups are necessary. Before I click the backup button, I ask myself if I am happy with the state of my recent changes, and if yes, then off we go. I do not let my computer choose the time or frequency of backups, I choose that myself.

I am not losing any sleep whatsoever about the security of my data. If through some extraordinary circumstance I did lose it all irretrievably, I would be unhappy but it would not be life-changing. There's nothing there I can't live without.

What does worry me is the idea of having my data stored on some stranger's computer over which I have no control whatsoever.

tanstaafl.