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View Full Version : HD Capacity Outstrips Backup Technology


Chris Gohlke
07-06-2005, 07:00 PM
<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=24201' target='_blank'>http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=24201</a><br /><br /></div><i>"If you shop correctly today, you can buy a terabyte of disk for under $1000. Exactly how much under $1000 again depends on the sale of the week. But putting that amount of disk space to useful work is going to require non-trivial efforts for The Rest of Us, assuming you can fill it all up. Say, for the sake of argument, you manage to fill up that terabyte of disk space without going crazy. The next problem is backing it up."</i><br /><br />I'm not to the point of having this problem yet. While I have a lot of data on my PC, only a few GB worth are critical. Here is my backup strategy. I have a 60 GB and a 120 GB external drive hooked up to my PC. A few generations of full backups will fit on the 120 GB. I do an additional backup of critical items to the 60 GB drive (on which I leave as many generations as there is space for). I also do a periodic backup of the critical stuff to a DVD which I take to work and store in my office for an off-site backup. What is your backup strategy?

Jerry Raia
07-06-2005, 07:07 PM
Similar to yours except I back up to internal hard drives and DVD DL for the big backups and regular DVD's and CD's for smaller periodic backups that then go with me on trips.

RenesisX
07-06-2005, 07:14 PM
We have about 6Tb of useful data here - only sane way to back it up was to get another 6Tb of hard drives off-site.

At one of my previous employers (a certain large music download store with close to 1m tracks) we breached 1Tb pretty quickly - I'd hate to think how many Tb they have now. We had hundreds and hundreds of backup tapes filled with media files, and don't even think about what happens when one of the RAID arrays completely fails...!

sdattilo
07-07-2005, 02:49 AM
Here at home I have a 200 GB seagate external USB that is shared amoungst three machines... I use this one to just drag over the "my documents" folder on the main machines to back up the pictures and docs... I also have an installs folder for all the programs and updates that get installed. (i have an addiction to buying new motherboards, processors, and upgrading a lot.)

I alos caught a coupon and a sale at Best Buy of all places and picked up a 160gb MIRA backup server which works great. just runs in the background and updates and backs up all three machines.

I never thought of grabing a couple of DVD's and storing them at work, but if some catastrophe hit the house I gues backing up twice would be silly if they are sitting in the same room... DUH :idea:

good plan there.

Chris Gohlke
07-07-2005, 12:29 PM
I never thought of grabing a couple of DVD's and storing them at work, but if some catastrophe hit the house I gues backing up twice would be silly if they are sitting in the same room... DUH :idea:

good plan there.

Yeah, I figure if my house and office are both destroyed in the same day, losing my computer data is probably the least of my worries. But in that event, I do usually have a copy (not super current) of My Documents on my iRiver and I also take a DVD backup to my Safety Deposit Box about once a year.

An interesting note, the typical safe you have at home will not protect a data cd/dvd. They are designed to keep paper from buring which only requires the temp to stay below 212 degrees F. At those temps, CDs and DVDs are probably toast.

Doug Johnson
07-07-2005, 07:56 PM
(1) Backup all important files to a second hard drive in my main PC.
(2) Synchronize all important files with two laptops. One of those laptops makes and keeps extra copies of all of these files.
(3) The most critical files are synchronized with another computer on my network.
(4) Backup important files to a server, keeping up to 10 versions of each file. (though after 180 days non-current file versions are removed)
(5) Backup important files via VPN to an off-site computer nightly.
(6) Periodically burn DVDs or CDs of important files, at least two copies of each. Mail one copy of each disc to someone else I trust.

Items 1,2,3,4 and 5 are all done automatically without any intervention on my part, so it makes it really easy to keep the backups up to date. I use FileBack PC (www.fileback-pc.com) to do this.

randalllewis
07-08-2005, 01:04 AM
I have a 120GB drive and a 120G standalone. The back-up software is programed to back up data, music and photo files once a week and there is room for several generations on the back-up drive. I also copy via drag and drop my music and picture files as a separate back-up to the standalone. Then every couple of months I copy data, music, and photos to DVD, stored in a different part of the house. So what I've learned here is that I should take those DVD's to work or some other location. Thanks for the idea.