Backups - How do you do yours?

Freakish_05

Freakish_05

Freakish_05

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Bristol, UK
Evening All.

Thought I'd post in here as this is a fairly generic-ish topic :p

I'm trying to decide which is the best way to backup all of my files. I have a fairly substantial amount of data (in excess of 250gb, and now that I have 20mbit that's likely to grow very quickly) which consists of MP3s, various movie files, game patches and maps and actual 'important' files like bank statements, correspondance and other electronic documents that must be kept for 7 years (thank you inland revenue).

There are two options that I can see. Use HDD's and a. risk losing a LOT when the drive fails - and we all know it will or b. spend lots of money on raid 1 which will fill up my case quickly. Alternatively I can use DVD-R/RW's which have their own risks - scratching/snapping/bleeding.

So, I leave it to the good folk of OcUK to decide for me the best way for me to keep my data safe.

Cheers all,
Freakish_05
 
You only need your imporant files like bank statments, images e.t.c. Stuff like that of mine get backed up onto usb sticks / removable hard drives / dvds / cds and put away.

Other stuff is just useless.
 
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Acronis True Image 11, USB to IDE adaptor, and a 160gb Western Digital harddrive.

I do it about once a month - in between which the harddrive is powered down, stored in an anti-static bag, put into a padded envelope, put into a box on top of polystyrene things, put more of the polystyrene on top and around the harddrive until full.

Nothing like a little precaution. :p
 
I backup internally to prevent against deletions, externally to prevent against surges, theft etc. And offsite to protect from fire/aliens/Tom Cruise.
 
i just email important documents to my hotmail account and stick them in a seperate folder. Can only be 200mb at the most.

Everything else on HD is downloads or apps, why backup something that can be replaced?

edit: at work data for 110 users fits on 3 AIT2 50gb tapes, these 500gb backups semm over the top unless your doing bare metal restores
 
I've recently bought a Samsung 500Gb SATA disk and put it in an IcyBox enclosure.

Need to investigate Synctoy a bit more and see if it'll do me or would I benefit from getting Acronis TrueImage 11.

basmic - How have you got Acronis TrueImage 11 then? You must have downloaded it off their site?
 
have a look at image for windows, very quick and the demo version lasts forever with just a wanring message
 
Freakish_05 said:
Evening All.

Thought I'd post in here as this is a fairly generic-ish topic :p

I'm trying to decide which is the best way to backup all of my files. I have a fairly substantial amount of data (in excess of 250gb, and now that I have 20mbit that's likely to grow very quickly) which consists of MP3s, various movie files, game patches and maps and actual 'important' files like bank statements, correspondance and other electronic documents that must be kept for 7 years (thank you inland revenue).

There are two options that I can see. Use HDD's and a. risk losing a LOT when the drive fails - and we all know it will or b. spend lots of money on raid 1 which will fill up my case quickly. Alternatively I can use DVD-R/RW's which have their own risks - scratching/snapping/bleeding.

So, I leave it to the good folk of OcUK to decide for me the best way for me to keep my data safe.

Cheers all,
Freakish_05
Click to expand...

I'm getting the following setup soon, Acronis Trueimage will be used to back it up:

Internal: 2x250GB 2500AAKS RAID 0 - installs, programs, games, OS. Nothing important will be stored on the RAID 0 setup, game saves/appdata will be backed up daily using Synctoy.
Internal: 500GB internal 5000AAKS - storage
External (internal drive+Icybox eSATA): 500GB 5000AAKS - backup of storage using Acronis.

Sorted ;)
 
I guess i'd better explain Mozy a bit more.

Online backup.
Unlimted capacity
$5 a month (£2.50)

Bargain.

To all those who back up onto an external drive or onto DVD.

What happens if a fire were to happen? Or if you PC and all the little gubbins were stolen?
 
2 X 320GB Samsung Spinpoint HD split into 5 partitions.
250GB Samsung Spinpoint in IcyBox used to Synctoy.
160GB Samsung Spinpoint As a second backup or original backup.

Vanilla, that's a good point. I might look into that :)
 
Favourites and e-mail is backed up to my BT digital vault space and media is backed up to another hard disk drive, which I might make external soon.
 
Freakish_05 said:
.... snip ....

b. spend lots of money on raid 1 which will fill up my case quickly.

.... snip ....
Click to expand...

Raids not backup mmmkay, will only prevent data loss due to hard disk failure not accidental deletion.

My backups are rather overkill, (due to having had to DR things at work before now so being paranoid). Data is classed into three levels;
1). Important documents, (things like My Documents which is housed on the server instead of PCs and mailbox files). Small.
2). Media data which can be regenerated with work and time, e.g. mp3 from CDs. Quite large.
3). Random downloaded rubbish, (linux ISOs etc). Quite large.

Currently the following backups run on my server:

1). First backup creates daily archives of class 1 files on a weekly rotation. These are stored in multiple places in case of issues. Thinking about it I think there are up to 3 copies of each of these files, elsewhere on Raid in case of accidental deletion, on seperate non-raid internal backup disk and via rsync to remote server. This is a fairly small backup.

2). Second backup involves two rsync jobs and involves class 1 and 2 files. The first job does a straight sync across to the seperate internal disk and the second does the same to a remote server, (as class 2 data is quite large initial remote population was performed before the server was shipped to site). This runs daily.

3). Third backup is run monthly and involves rsyncing all classes of data over to USB disk(s) which are then disconnected and kept unplugged till the next backup, normally in my drawer at work.

Class 2 data is also held on at least two other machines as well. This means that I should be covered if I delete something important, loose the RAID array or even the whole server/house with the most being lost being any random class 3 down loads in the last month. The remote server is the Linux server at my parents which does the same sort of jobs on their LAN as mine does on mine. Remote rsyncs run over SSH tunnels, (good thing Be's ADSL2 has a reasonable upload speed).

edit: of course everything logs and I'm emailed if any errors occur

For a while I was beta testing Tivoli Storage Manager for Linux for work so was also running backups to disk storage pools on a local TSM server ... that was real overkill :)
 
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I bought a Seagate Freeagent 140Gb 2.5inch drive, at weekends I use the Windows tool ROBOCOPY to take a full, clean backup of everything and then take the drive with me to work. That way if either work or my house is burgled, catches fire or some other disaster, everything is on another site.

Seriously, check out ROBOCOPY. Its free, command line driven and hence the name, very robust. It checks the source and destination and only copies over changes. I have a batch file on my drive that kicks of the command and pipes the output log to a text file. I run the backup and then check the log for any problems.
 
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