Where

Away from the computer.

How far way?

As far away as it takes to get you to stop and think before you act.

Back in the days of floppy disks we kept a spare copy of our data on a second diskette in the drawer.

When the first diskette got itself ruined by a flaky floppy drive, we said “No probs!”, brought out the second floppy diskette, popped it in the flaky drive and trashed that diskette too!

Pretty soon we learned to keep the second diskette in a colleague’s drawer and make them promise not to hand it over until after lunch time, or coffee break, whichever came first. The idea being that a few minutes careful thought can go a long way towards preserving precious data.

In my home office I keep the backup drive in a linen closet. The building catches fire my hard drive will probably survive.

Every now and then I leave a spare hard drive with my accountant a mile away. A jet plane hits my building I’ll die, but my data will be safe.