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

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Howard_Casto:

--- Quote from: jimmy2x2x on September 05, 2010, 01:00:26 pm ---just curious about the amount of data you guys are talking about.


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Personally I've got about 40 gigs of music and I dont' believe in stupid e-commerce vaporware like itunes so my mp3s are physically ripped from cds.  It's technically backed up in that regard, but man... it'd take forever to re-rip it all.

I also write software (a lot for this hobby) so I've got about 20 gigs of irrereplacable source code.  Also I do a lot of artwork and all of the family photos are on my pc.  So there's gigs of that stuff as well.

Then of course mame chds and daphne mpegs.  Those are just huge!  I have em backed up on dvd of course but it'd be a pain to transfer them back on the pc so I like to keep those safe. 


patrickl:

--- Quote from: Howard_Casto on September 05, 2010, 05:00:53 pm ---
--- Quote from: patrickl on September 05, 2010, 11:00:09 am ---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.

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Absolutely nothing IF by mirroring you mean the drive simply copies what's on the parent and that mirrored drive is perfectly readable without the mirroring software.  But if software is required then you've made a brick basically because all manners of badness can happen if somethign goes wrong with windows, the software becomes outdated ect....  Also some of the mirroring stuff is too DUMB and they do a straight binary copy.  If the parent drive is good then all is well, but if it has physical errors which result in a funky write, said funky write can be copied over to the mirror drive and if it's something crucial like the file table then you've just partially corrupted your backup data. 
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Never had this happen, but indeed I always wondered how they detect bad blocks on a disk and which disk is actually bad.


--- Quote ---They are definately a good option, but for me at least, more trouble and expense then they are worth.  They don't hurt anything though, so if you have spare hdds around put em in an enclosure and have at it!
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I was actually asking because I though someone said that mirrored disks are a bad idea, but I guess I just misread.

Personally I have found they save a lot of time for practically no cost. When a disk goes bad I just take it out and replace it. It also works for off site backups. I simply pull one disk out and replace it with the spare.

I use offline backups too. My webservers synchronize to my office file server overnight. Only problem with that is if I actually need to put it back. To do that over an internet connection would take forever. Primary backup is an extra disk in the webserver though.

AtomSmasher:
Does anyone have any opinions about Carbonite?  My mom has a home business and has to keep all of her stuff backed up.  I used to do it manually every couple of months, but now everything gets backed up on a second harddrive automatically, although I still back it up on an external hd every 6 months or so.

Frankly I'd prefer to have something simple and secure so I no longer have to worry about it, which is why I'm now looking at online backup such as Carbonite.

Blanka:
For me online is too slow. If I've done a shoot with 16Gb of photo's, then it would take tons of time to upload that. With 2 fire-wire drives, it is 5 minutes work on Friday.

smalltownguy:

--- Quote from: AtomSmasher on September 06, 2010, 03:07:31 am ---Does anyone have any opinions about Carbonite?  My mom has a home business and has to keep all of her stuff backed up.  I used to do it manually every couple of months, but now everything gets backed up on a second harddrive automatically, although I still back it up on an external hd every 6 months or so.

Frankly I'd prefer to have something simple and secure so I no longer have to worry about it, which is why I'm now looking at online backup such as Carbonite.

--- End quote ---

Carbonite has saved ---my bottom--- at work a few times. There have been a few crucial spreadsheets that I had to recover using it. My boss used it to migrate to a new laptop when the old one was destroyed. She had about 40 gigs of user content, and it took 48 hours to download it all. Sure it took a long time, but she's and average joe user, and the process was very easy for her to use. For me, that solution is too long -- and at $50 PER COMPUTER a year, I could have a couple of decent sized hard drives after 4 years for that money.

Me, I regularly email myself files that I need to keep tabs on regularly. Sure it's not a very secure way to backup files, but it does create a multiple redundancy that keeps me satisfied. I now have a copy of the file on my laptop, in my email, and also saved on the 3rd party email provider's servers.

I'd really like to find some sort of program that will allow you to plug in an external hard drive and it will automatically 'sniff' pre-selected folders you choose and backup updated content. Anything that has not changed will be left alone, i.e. it doesn't need to be re-written. Then I'll just get in the habit of plugging in the external HD about every few days or so.

Anyone find a method like this that works?

 

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