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

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jimmy2x2x:
just curious about the amount of data you guys are talking about.

Is the bulk of the data user created content?

I suspect it isn't, a newsgroup subscription and membership to a couple of decent tracker sites would recover most of that data in a shorter time and at a lower cost, with the side effect of newer collections in some cases.

I agree with separate data drives and a common file structure on those drives, it makes them interchangeable between systems, easier to reinstall the operating system if you need to.

My backups are consist of personal data (documents, photos, passwords etc) which are relatively small, backed up on site and online.  Everything else can be reconstructed easily, either by reacquisition or duplicating from another system.



drventure:
That'd work unless you:

1) have a ton of movies or mp3s, in my many of which were ripped from Vinyl that you can't buy in digital form
2) have a ton of pictures or home vids of the kids and such that you couldn't reacquire in any event.
3) have a ton of other stuff, things like Installations, Dev stuff (I'm a programmer), and whatnot that would be difficult to "reaquire"
4) have a spent a bunch of time cleaning up image files, rom sets, etc. Sure, I could probably re-acquire all the files later, but when you're recovering from a nasty disaster like a downed machine, the last thing I want to do is ALSO redo a ton of work I did cleaning everything up in the first place.


USB drives are so cheap, it will often make more sense to pick up 2, backup regularly and just rotate them offsite (say to my parent's house, or a safe deposit box) on a monthly basis or so.

Even as an IT pro, systems can go boom to the point where they aren't recoverable. I got lucky with the lightning strike recently in that, in my NAS, which had two mirrored drives, one drive survived intact and I could recover it. And it had the lions share of my recent changed data on it. A backup disk had all the older stuff.

Silas (son of Silas):
I have about 4tb of music and movies sitting on a logical volume (so I can expand it when it starts to fill by adding more disks) and a second identical 4tb logical volume that I back up to.

As my media is already compressed to hell and back, there's no point trying to compress it further when backing it up so I use LuckyBackup (front end for rsync) that runs every day and keeps my live LV and backup LV sync'd.

The way I look at it, the amount I save in not having any TV service in my home (and therefore not having to pay for a TV license, cable or satellite fee) easily covers the cost of my stonkingly huge amounts of storage in my media server.

Howard_Casto:

--- Quote from: pinballjim on September 05, 2010, 02:54:32 pm ---
--- Quote from: Blanka on September 05, 2010, 11:57:43 am ---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.

--- End quote ---

Good lord, I thought that urban legend died 20 years ago.   :P

--- End quote ---

Agreed.  Dvds get read errors due to scratching and/or bad burns.  By the time the dvd wears out the data will be too old for you to care.

Howard_Casto:

--- 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.

--- End quote ---

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. 

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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