Is there a need to back up OneNote?

[StarStruck]

It is already backed up on OneDrive, but I'm paranoid something might go wrong and I might loose my OneNote somehow. Are solar flares a danger? There is so much value in my OneNote, if I loose it, I don't know if I could bare it. My plan is to back it up on an USB stick one a month or something, but at the same time OneNote is installed on my laptop and desktop locally so I don't know if it is necessary.

[Buck Edwards]

You cannot rely on anything. I particularly dislike one note. You could have a physical back up. But change your physical back up every year to the one that's most recent. Physical backup can get outdated sometimes. You never know. Also keep multiple copies of your physical backup. 

All of this is expensive. I suggest a cloud backup like pcloud and Google Drive. 

I never rely on online backup except cloud

 

[Buck Edwards]

You could store your stuff in a pdf format in a folder. 

 

[Ulax]

@StarStruck I personally always think the more backups the better

[StarStruck]

@Ulax @Enlightement @Enlightement  my onenote journals are like 5gb, no way I'm going to print that out.

[Ulax]

@StarStruck what you could do instead of printing it out is save it as a PDF. Then upload it to say a Google Drive

[something_else]

If it's really important and you want to be excessive I would aim for 3 or 4 copies:

• One on the PC you use for it day to day
• One local backup on an external SSD or HDD, store this inside a little Faraday cage pocket you can buy for like £10 online
• One copy on OneDrive
• Potentially one copy on some other cloud backup service

Something pretty catastrophic would have to happen for you to lose everything if you followed that. You would likely be fine with just one cloud backup service because these services are designed to essentially never lose any data. Chances are if something happened that meant you couldn't ever recover your data from OneDrive you would have bigger problems to worry about than getting your OneNote document back.

Edited April 13, 2023 by something_else

[StarStruck]

@something_else solar flare would fuck that up

 

[something_else]

3 hours ago, StarStruck said:

@something_else solar flare would fuck that up

 

That's what the Faraday cage pouch is for. If you want more solid protection I guess you buy a more expensive one. But I'm pretty sure even a grounded metal tin is probably enough to protect an unplugged external drive from a solar flare.

Most cloud backup services are probably going to have defenses in place to restore data even after a solar flare anyway.

Edited April 13, 2023 by something_else