In addition to Crashplan, I typically run the built-in backup program as well - just to cover the case where the backup program itself was not working properly. For example, on Macs I use Time Machine and on Windows I use the Windows Backup running in parallel with Crashplan.

I wouldn't get too cocky... In the "Linux" world you can indeed run zfs, but you have to roll your own since it uses an incompatible license - it came out of Sun and was released with a non-GPL compatible license. btrfs has many of these features, but it has only recently become "production" quality - and even then, not all of the features are stable. MS was slightly ahead of Linux in the filesystem department.

I ran 8 for a year and put up with all of the usability crap, but they lost me when my hard drive died and I found out how crappy the built-in backup software is. The damn thing doesn't save a disk image, nor have a similar way to recover from a completely dead disk. If I have to reinstall from scratch, it sure as hell wasn't going to be 8 again. So now I'm back to 7 and its sane backup program.

It's not like the early version of Vista, though. It's more like a late Vista service release.

I think this probably indicates that they bite off too much in each release. It's actually a common problem when companies try to abandon an incremental development cycle and get a little ambitious.

NTFS supports arbitrary metadata "streams", analogous to xattrs on unix. Windows and applications simply don't make use of them very much.

Also, Microsoft did introduce a new filesystem: ReFS. It is sort-of analogous to zfs or btrfs, but not very well supported in Windows 8 at the moment and not as feature-complete. Still, they seem to be ahead of Apple which is still using HFS.

That's another good idea, though you wouldn't be able to take advantage of clones and such so that the backup's data would be invalid once the resilver started until it was finished... If I went that route, I'd make sure I had completed a scrub before connecting the backup drives.

Well, you certainly save money on blinker fluid but you end up paying out the nose for voltage grease.

You have me wondering if using zfs wouldn't be a good option here. You could put the pair of drives in a single enclosure and make them into a pool. Then every quarter or so bring your drives home, update the data, and do a scrub. Thus you get the parity for "free". If your primary backup is also zfs, you can even do a zfs send and get incremental backups for "free" as well.

Of course, now the "all you can eat" online backup services are starting to approach the cost of a safety deposit box :)

I agree. However, the nice thing about keeping the data live is that it will benefit from any upgrades you do over the years... what seems like a lot of storage today will be trivial in the future. And you can piggyback on your video storage backup for all of your backup needs. But yeah, the simplest thing to do is copy to a pair of drives and put them in a safe deposit box. From past experience, I would probably add a drive full of parity data as well :)

I looked into BTSync and - at least as of a few months ago - it really had trouble with mixed computer OS environments. It would probably be fine for simple video files, but it did not handle all the Mac metadata on Windows, Windows metadata on Linux, etc. There are workarounds, but nothing I felt like dealing with.

Definitely this. If you have a buddy or relative willing to have a little NAS box running on their network, you can do something like Crashplan and get offsite backup for "free". I happen to use Crashplan, but rsync would work just fine. Both let you "seed" the initial backup so that you aren't waiting for months to do the initial backup.

Let's not fight over technicalities of law. You and I appear to be on the same side and want the same thing. The people in charge are wrong whether it is technically legal or not.

Thank you. This point is the only really important one. What they were doing may not have even been illegal, which is the whole problem. A rogue agency would have been easy to correct in comparison to an entire government which had overstepped it's bounds.

Weird Al has a whole song about just this very thing.

Where "huge" is 3 degrees... :)