Backups - How do you do yours?

I'd bet 100% of the 'important' stuff can be backed up on to a couple of DVD-R's mulitiple times, and kept updated say once a month.

The rest - get a 500G+ removeable hard drive and use that.

To save backups space on media files, burn them e.g for movies, convert to DVD Video and burn to disc with the orginal. It's a pain at first catching up, but whenever you get a new set just make a new disc.

You could set up scheduled tasks / cron jobs with scripts to copy and zip your data or use something like trueimage.

Alternatively set up a disk server with raid 5 or 1 and just have a live running backup that updates overnight. You could integrate versioning and all sorts.

And raid isn't backup - it's redundancy. If a HD fails you haven't lost your data. If a fire breaks or you delete a file you have lost your data.
 
tang0 said:
whats the advantage of using a program to backup files to another drive ?

whats wrong with copy and paste ?
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Lets say I have 100gb of stuff. Week to week only a few of the thousands of files change. Copy paste means spending an age moving 100gb. Using a paid for tool or something like ROBOCOPY means you can only copy the changes, which unless you've modified every last file, will be a lot quicker.
 
memyselfandi said:
Raids not backup mmmkay, will only prevent data loss due to hard disk failure not accidental deletion.
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Nice to see someone's paying attention ;)

jdickerson said:
I backup internally to prevent against deletions, externally to prevent against surges, theft etc. And offsite to protect from fire/aliens/Tom Cruise.
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As long as he's only trying to steal my data and not add a copy of Days of Thunder too it :eek: Otherwise a very familiar plan....

Freakish_05 said:
Alternatively I can use DVD-R/RW's which have their own risks - scratching/snapping/bleeding.
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Decent quality DVDRs kept properly are a perfectly good offline backup. All of mine have an MD5 hash file of the contents on them so that I can verify the backup both immediately after the burn and periodically thereafter.


Most of the time it's easier to think about how the data needs to be recovered rather than how it should be backed up. Your recovery requirements should drive your backup requirements, not the other way around. For example if you need near 100% data availability then by all means think about RAID1 or 5 but also think about file level backups. What about loss through fire (or Tom Cruise ;) )? Offsite backups are the only solution - I have a copy of everything important at my parents' place. Finally cost is always a factor whether it be in DVDR media or external HDDs and unfortunately only you can really put a price on your own data. Backups are insurance, if you can afford more than one backup copy then, in my opinion, you're daft not to.
 
rpstewart said:
Decent quality DVDRs kept properly are a perfectly good offline backup. All of mine have an MD5 hash file of the contents on them so that I can verify the backup both immediately after the burn and periodically thereafter.
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Intresting. How do you do that? What kind of files types are you storing?
 
Mmmh it's going to be quite expensive to backup all my stuff...it would mean basically doubling what I have now, and im running out of room already.
 
Can I ask what you guys are storing to need such huge space? Is it stuff like media, games etc. Or actual 'work' stuff, websites, forums etc.?
 
Moses99p said:
I have a Western Digital 500GB external, it's pretty good.

and I recently bought a new 500GB internal.

1.3TB all together :cool:
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I'm inclined to disagree since a 500Gb WD drive will only ever be a true 420Gb and your 300 will be 260-270.

420 x 2 = 840
840 + 270 = 1110

:(
 
Butters said:
I'm inclined to disagree since a 500Gb WD drive will only ever be a true 420Gb and your 300 will be 260-270.

420 x 2 = 840
840 + 270 = 1110

:(
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500GB + 500GB +300GB will always be 1.3TB. Windows will report this correctly as 1210 Gibabytes but incorrectly labels it as GBs rather than GiBs.
 
basmic said:
I'm afraid the forum's rules prevent me saying how I got it. ;)
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Touche. :p

Vanilla said:
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?
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Mozy wha?! :confused:
 
Yeah just saw your post earlier. Looks cool. How fast and reliable is it?

Have to say I don't like the idea of installing their software on my PC. Plus I've not got the fastest connection here so it'd take ages to upload the stuff. A lot quicker just to copy it to my external hdd.
 
If you must back up a few hundred gig, a second HDD is the most reasonable home method. Are you really going to span a backup over 50+ DVDs every week or so?

A HDD will fail sooner or later, but the chance of your main HDD and your backup HDD failing at the same time is very low.

So I'd use a second HDD, probably externally in a box. That way, you can keep it separately from your PC in case of theft.

For the software, Acronis True Image does the job well for me (although I only back up my system partition and key data - the rest can be reinstalled from discs or downloaded again if needed). You can get free imaging software (using a Linux liveCD), but I decided that the convenience of Acronis was worth paying for.
 
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