Back Up solutions - External Hard Drive - 1TB

williamd

williamd

williamd

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31 Mar 2007
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I had a problem yesterday and nearly lost 500GB of data. I've managed to recover it all but I'd rather not go through that again.

I've decided that an external drive might be the best solution. It has to be extremely reliable with a good guarantee.

I don't even know where to stop with backing up. It's got to the point where I'm tempted to back up my back ups but its ridiculous.

Anyway, any recommendations?
 
Depending on how vital the info is, there are different levels that might be concidered acceptable.
Many have external drives/NAS's that they backup everything to. Naturally the drives in these can also die.
Backing up to DVD/CD is also useful, especially for documets you cannot live without (financial documents/Dissertations etc).
Personally I keep all my media stuff backed up to another internal drive. All my photos/Music are backed up on my NAS and document are on all drives and on multiple SD/Usb memory cards, as the price of them is so low these days.
 
I use a NAS as central storage but I also backup those files onto a 2nd machine (or at least those that I could not live without - or the wife would kill me if we lost) :)

All it takes it to lose it once and your testicles will be mashed!!
 
balls said:
Depending on how vital the info is, there are different levels that might be concidered acceptable.
Click to expand...
That's the key. The problem with backups is people try to work out how to back things up which is the wrong way to look at it. You need to work out how to restore the data, specifically what and how quickly, that will in turn drive the appropriate backup strategy.

Take my photos for example, I have probably 750Gb which needs protected and is irreplaceable so I need to recover in the event of fire, theft etc as well as hardware failures, data corruption etc. To get round that everything is backed up to 2 DVDs with one copy at home and one at my parents. Restoring 750Gb in the event of a hardware failure would take a daft amount of time so to avoid that it's all sat on a RAID5 array. I only back up to DVD when I have 4Gb of a particular subject so there will always be a few Gb of stuff waiting to go to DVD so that gets synched to an external HDD on a regular basis while sitting on RAID5. For large volume shoots (Goodwood RIAT etc) I have been known to leave another external HDD offsite until I get the DVDs burned as that can take a few weeks.

The other thing to consider is that a backup is useless if it's either incorrect or unreadable so backups need to be checked regularly. All my DVDs include an MD5 hash file which is generated before the disk is burned and can be used to confirm that the contents are still reading correctly.
 
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