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Comment by ugh | Hacker News Reader

It's unlikely that both yout iOS device and your PC will fail at the same time. Backing up an iOS device to a PC is as good as any other backup.

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No, a good backup best practice is to incorporate an off site point into your redundancy plan.

Oh come on. Really? You know exactly what I mean. No need to get pedantic.

It's as good as any Time Machine or similar backup, you know, the kind of backup a tiny minority of normal people may actually attempt to make.

It's, at any rate, a vast improvment over the kind of baclup most people make (none at all).

"Off site" just means in physically different locations, so that some kind of local calamity wouldn't take out both, right? It seems like having it backed up on the PC satisfies that requirement to some extent, since the iPad and the PC are likely to be in different locations a lot of the time. It's not as good as a proper off-site backup, but it's better than nothing.

Sure it's better than nothing but it's not a good backup plan. The reasoning was that Apple is holding back OTA updates because this one niche thing isn't covered perfectly (although Carbonite and others do a good job of hands-off online backup). I'm saying that if you're protecting something which isn't very good in the first place, and holding back a lot of good features because of it, that's a bad reason to do so.

It's much better than no backup. An offsite backup offers only little additional security. (Not that it's not worth it. But the difference between no backup and backup is vast, the difference between backup and offsite backup is small. It's like the difference between a $50 dinner and a $100 dinner — noticable but rather irrelevant compared to a combo meal from McDonald's.)

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