The lake weekend ALBUM 01
An exceedingly small disaster laboratory
Memory
Lifeboat.
The laptop can be replaced.
The cardboard-robot birthday cannot.
Robot birthday ALBUM 02
The coastal train ALBUM 03
Every album starts on the laptop. Extra copies cost credits, not real money.
Desk drive · 1 credit
An unplugged, independent disk at home. Safe from sync deletions, not home theft.
Off-site drive · 1 credit
An independent disk at a friend’s house. Different location, same drive medium as the desk disk.
Cloud sync · 1 credit
An off-site mirror. Delete an album on the laptop and the deletion travels here too.
Versioned backup · 2 credits
Off-site cloud snapshots with retained history. Can restore an earlier version after deletion.
02 / Try some very bad luck
Will the memories make it?
Each test starts from your intact plan. Disasters do not stack. You can change your copies while a test is open.
3 · 2 · 1
The useful little rule: three copies, on two storage media, with one copy off-site. Here the laptop, physical backup disks, and cloud count as three media categories.
A mirror is not a time machine. Three copies can meet the numbers and still share a deletion risk. Independent copies, retained versions, and actually testing a restore are what make a plan useful.
Try protecting every album from all four incidents AND earning all three checkmarks, without overspending. There is more than one solution.