How do you guys manage and backup your files ?

Slinger

Slinger

Slinger

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4 Dec 2006
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468
Location
Hertford/Portsmouth
My hard drives are getting near on full and I am wondering what I am gonna do for the best backup solution and management.

Now I only have a laptop, Its got a 320gig drive but I dont use it for storage, I have two 500gig externals, which at the moment I have double copies of my various HD content. They each only have about 2 gig of space left...

Is it wise to keep a double of all files in case one drive fails ? I do have other hard drives of various sizes, and to make use of them, am thinking about getting a dock so I can switch out the drives easily doing away with the need for separate caddies,

so whats the best when everything will be on external drives ?
 
Yeah i would agree with the NAS it's something am thinking about not for backing up but for a quieter home cinema pc and have the nas in another room.

But for back up i have a 500GB WD notebook for now, but if i wanted to go major then it would have to be 4x1.5TB drives and a Synology Disk Station DS409 4-Bay NAS Enclosure, but not all 1.5TB drives at once.
 
I'm now using a Windows Home Server to back up all my PC's in the house and to provide a shared storage point to all PC's.
 
Backup with Allwaysync for the storage array and a script for Driveimage XML I wrote for the primary (boot) drive. The media I use is a large SATA drive that I pop in a caddy in the front of my case, aside from eSATA, the other interfaces available for removable media are simply too slow for large quantities of data. I then put the hard drive in a re-enforced and padlocked case and leave it at work. I don't feel comfortable backing up to a location in the same building as what I am backing up from, if you got burgled or the house burned down then you're boned. Off site backups are the only way imo.
 
I am wondering this as well not just for backups but for situations where you have a number of terabytes of data which needs to be accessed.

I started looking at NAS drives but would ideally want one with 4 bays so I could hot swap a number of drives and have the other 2 bays in a RAID. But the prices of a 4 bay NAS enclosure are obscene.

DVDs do not offer enough capacity and blu ray media is still too expensive.

Is a strange time these days with a 50mbit internet connection which could potentially run up terabytes of data in a matter of a month or two and no real cheap practical solution for storage. The external hard drive idea is ok for a couple of drives but I really wouldn't like to have 5 external drives sprawled all over the place.
 
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I use:
1. Mozy remote backup
2. Windows Home Server
3. daily to a non-portable USB drive
4. weekly to a portable USB drive
 
boxman2000 said:
A friend of mine (who is a security admin for the local government and home office) uses Carbonite which is $54.95 per year for unlimited storage.

Probably going for this myself.
Click to expand...

I've tried similar but have fun uploading all your media files - takes forever and it isn't necessarily your connection which is the bottleneck. Plugging my laptop into a gigabit port in a datacenter (which I've previously tested as being able to download at around 120Mbps) I couldn't get mozy to upload by filters faster than 3Mbps or so....
 
Daily (or sometimes not) to WHS.
Weekly clone of the primary WHS to a second WHS.
Monthly copy of selected directories to a NAS or USB drive for offsite storage.
Also keep a copy of a single clean install image (Acronis) for each client machine.

Most of my data is kept on the WHS with duplication on. I use Acronis for clean bare metal images. So I don't use up slots on the WHS (it only supports 10 clients) for machines I support (friends, family, etc) and also because the WHS backup could be corrupted - not a big issue unless the WHS backup and your client goes at the same time, but would be an issue if you ever want to restore a clean install image.
 
I got all virtually everything on RAID5, with irreplaceable stuff on DVD (Stuff like photos) and stored in case in the loft and gets added to now and then. Same data again is on an external 1TB drive kept here along with stuff it would nice not to lose but could live without (this gets updated weekly-ish) and a 2nd 1TB external (synced from the 1st every month or so) held at my parents house.

I'm looking at online storage to replicate the 2nd 1TB. I can get the storage space fine, it's just the getting the initial data there may take a while and it'll get done everyweek too so is one less thing to think about.
 
Most of my stuff is backed up on a 1.5TB external drive, which is kept off when not in use. The rest, is currently on a 500GB drive inside my PC. However, I need to sort all this storage out. It's all a bit crap sadly. Need to really fix it.
 
I use WHS for my 2 laptops and then crashplan+ to make a backup of the data off the WHS to another box.

Next step is to add a remote drive and use Crashplan+ to duplicate over to that too
 
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