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Let's talk about data backup options! Share your favorite ideas.

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smalltownguy:
I'm realizing that after 5 years in the IT industry supporting client solutions for data backup, mirroring, raid arrays and the like, I'm realizing that my own personal data backup situation is pretty terrible at best. I've already experienced 2 lost data situations, resulting in time consuming software based methods to recover all important documents and pictures. They say the plumber's toilet is always broken -- so true, so true.

That said, what is everyone using for their own personal backup options? Has anyone found any effective methods that are low cost (free?) Don't get me wrong, I'm willing to pay for a system that provides value, but I'm also wise enough to know that the community at large must know about SOMETHING that works well for an inexpensive investment.

I've tried several online methods that install services on your machines like carbonite, jungledisk, etc. Each has it's pluses and minuses.

What do you guys suggest?

drventure:
At one point, I was using an Iomega SAN disk array (a plain 2 drive mirrored system was pretty inexpensive), but it got fried in the lightning hit.

Fortunately the drives (well one of them) was still good, so I was able to recover it's content completely.

Iomega units can be pretty pricey for the bigger systems (the last was a 1tb system, mirrored so I got 500gb storage).

So this time, I just built a machine, and put 2 2tb drives in it and mirrored them. A little cheaper, plus I can run other stuff on the machine.

I use FileBack PC for backup purposes. I like it because you can setup triggers such that it'll start a backup as soon as you plug a USB drive in.

So, then I have third 2tb usb drive that I regularly just plug in. Fileback kicks off and backs up everything to it, complete with several previous versions of the files. That drive goes into a firesafe when it's not plugged up.

And in between those backups, I have fileback nightly reach into each of my machines on the network and copy important files up to a "nearline" backup on the NAS server.

It can take some time to set up, but I've never lost any data.

I've been pretty intrigued about the online backup services, but the monthly cost per gig makes them a bit out of my reach.

Howard_Casto:
I wouldn't worry about it.  Simply put us IT people don't need to backup our data as much because we know what we are doing.  If our computers start acting up we attend to it before they get to the breaking point.  If they DO break it's very unlikely that the harddrive itself will be completely unusable and we are competant enough to pull important data off the HDD of a dead computer. 

Ghost and similar software isn't a good option because unlike in a business situation, generally when we need to recover data it's because the pc has failed and the data will be put on a new computer with new specs.  I mean yeah you technically can put the image on a different pc, but then it's a pain in the butt getting windows back in shape if the specs are too different. 

Online backup is equally useless.  I don't count it as backup if you have less than a gig of data to backup and if you do it'll take FOREVER to upload all of that to an online account.  I've got like 100+ gigs of unique data so online backup is worthless. 

So basically you've got two viable and cheap options that'll actually work. 


1.  Seperate data hdd.  I"m not saying get a dedicated backup drive, I'm saying put all your data on a seperate hdd.  You can setup all of window's folders to re-direct to a seperate hdd as well.  Then when you upgrade your pc or if it fails all you have to do is re-direct your windows folders after installation and you don't have to do anything.  Now you could use a dedicated backup hdd with an auto backup system on top of this, but again, restoration after something fails can be time consuming.

2.  Good old dvd backups.  I generally do this about once a year or so, putting more recent data on flash drives.  It takes a long time, it's a pain in the butt, but it's one of the few cheap, reliable methods out there.  You keep the directory structure in tact on the disc so it's a simple matter of dragging the whole mess back on a hdd if something fails.  This is also the best method for the average joe because most people aren't freaks with 80+ gigs of ACTUAL DATA to backup.  ;)

patrickl:
What's wrong with mirrored hard disk's though? Obviously that's not enough (against virusses, accidental deletes or fire), but I personally think adding an extra HD is an easy way of dealing with disk failures.

Blanka:

--- Quote from: Howard_Casto on September 05, 2010, 10:50:45 am ---2.  Good old dvd backups.
--- End quote ---

There is nothing good at DVD backups. My old ones (2 years and older) have lot of read errors already. DVD's are very sensible to disc rot.

Today I do everything with the biggest economic HD's available. I have around 800Gb of data, so at the moment I have 3 separate 1.5 TB external drives (cases with esata, USB and FW, with room for 1 SATA 3'5 inch drive), in 2 locations, and I sync the content every week with Synkron. RAID is a waste of money, as it needs way more disks than separate drives, and the discs are unreadable when mount separate in a case. When the 1.5 Gb limit is reached, 3Gb will be cheap and widely available and I migrate the discs to a higher capacity. 10 years ago I had 20 seagate removable HD's, 5 years ago I had everything on 10 DVD's, yesteryear I needed 2-3 hard drives for everything, and now 1 disk is enough. So number of disks needed went down to 1!

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