How Do You Backup?

TC

TC

Resident Agitator
You'll have to excuse the length of this post- this has been on my mind and I've got a lot of thoughts floating around.

A friend recently told me her dictum when it comes to keeping a file- "if you don't have it in two separate places, you don't have it."

Meaning that if you've only got one copy of a file on one harddrive then you should assume that it is going to crash and totally wipe you out. I thought this was a good way of thinking about it.

What do you guys do about preserving your files?

I used to burn segmented DVDs, but realizing the shelf life of most run-of-the-mill DVDs, this doesn't seem viable. (Some of my earliest ripped DVDs are already starting to fail). Plus it's a pain to pull a single file from a .rar that is spread out over 5 DVDs.

When I built my last computer I intended it to run RAID 5, but XP Home doesn't support it- so I'm left with almost 1TB of storage space inside my computer, with no fail safe.

Here's the scary part- I'm almost full up! Yikes!

What I'm thinking about doing is installing a hot-swap SATA bay, and I already have an IDE bay that I can use as well. Then just picking up whatever harddrives are on sale at Fry's that particular week and backing up 2 drives with the exact same contents.

Thoughts? I know it seems a bit costly and redundant, but with harddrive prices going way, WAY down it seems like the best solution.
 
after a computer crash last year, let me underscore the wisdom of your post. only really good solution to a computer crash is to have backed up regularly.

prices may not be there for this solution yet, but in the near future ... what about going to several blue ray discs?
 
I always have at least 2 and often three copies of everything. When I buy new drives for a new project, I buy duplicates.

Now, I am starting to put the back-up drives in a fire-safe. I would like to start moving them off site too, maybe to my mom's basement in Ohio, or a safe-deposit box or something.

You think it's expensive to be redundant, wait till you lose something you can't get back. Just do it.
 
Okay, awesome. I just wanted to make sure that I wasn't overlooking something fundamental.

Sounds like I got me a plan.
 
If you've got a minidv camera or deck, this is a useful tool.

http://www.coolatoola.com/

I have an old digital8 camera I use, as I feel the larger tapes are a bit more robust. You can span stuff across multiple tapes for endless cheap tape backups. Not too fast though, takes about an hour to fill up an hour tape (around 11 gigs).
 
Mark Harris said:
You think it's expensive to be redundant, wait till you lose something you can't get back. Just do it.
Click to expand...
It's VERY expensive...take my word for it. I back everything up on an additional drive and also store the raw data on DVDs. Depending on the size of the project, that can be a lot of DVDs but they're getting pretty cheap now.
 
If you have an old computer around you can setup a file server. I use one called free nas. Its linux based and it works very well. It does raid 5 altought mine is not setup that way.
http://www.freenas.org/

That could be one of the 2 copies......
 
i put one version in a hotswap sata bay. another copy on an external drive. recovering data or refudning money costs a lot more than any of those things. hope you are well, tc, how's that MV from the telltale people?
 
"How do you backup?"

I normally beep loudly while walking backwards slowly.



No seriously though, Most of my stuff is on anywhere from 2 to 5 places. Between my laptop hard dive, by 1.3TB of external USB Drives I have (which as distributed across the globe - how's that for "off-site"?) Plus a important stuff I drop on either file-servers at companies I do work for (when it's files relating to them) so that they go into their backup scheme. And some stuff I upload to my web-server too .. which is backed up daily by my ISP.

I also make archives occasionaly (like at the end of big projects) to DVDs, etc..

Unfortunaly there's no over-riding logic to it, so I don't always know where stuff is, but I'm confident that as long as it's important enough for me to remebre it; I have it in multiple places.

- Mikko
 
Mark Harris said:
You think it's expensive to be redundant, wait till you lose something you can't get back. Just do it.
Click to expand...

I'll second (or fourteenth) that.
I have taken to buying 2 identical drives , and putting one in a cheap external USB/Firewire box.

That gives 2 copies, but I'm still not totally happy. I would like to set up a pair of RAID arrays in the same kind of config as I use now, but bigger - as in 8 drives - 4 in the machine, in a RAID 6 config, and an identical set externally.
When I built my new PC, I specifically went for a motherboard with an E-SATA port on board to allow me to go down this route in the future.

I've had bad experiences with external SCSI boxes packing up in the past, and on occasion, taking the drives with them. As a result, I never power the external drive up unless I am actively using it (as in copying something to or from it)

It's proved to be a relatively cheap, very reliable system, which has saved my bacon on a number of occasions.
 
I like my dual drive eSATA enclosure. I'm just using it as a raid 0 for screwing around, but when the need arises, it's very easy to pop in two identical drives, put them in a raid 1 and go.

Jason
 
A side note, if you ever have a drive fail with that dreaded clunk-clunk sound upon startup, warp it in saran wrap, stick it in a ziploc bag and freeze it over nite. This will allow it to work until it heats up again, giving you a window of time to retrieve stuff before it fails. I did this recently and was able to save a bunch of non backed-up data, and the strange thing was after my 10th freeze cycle, I heard a loud pop come from my hard drive, and after that it worked perfectly again. I won't dare use it, but I was able to copy off everything and not have to redigitize projects I was in the middle of.
 
Two words: optical media.

Hard drives are necessary for work and for huge data storage but they can lose data easily since they are always surrounded by magnetic fields (camera, CRT, TV, other hard drives, etc.). They also lose magnetism through regular use and heat. Redundant drives (RAID or offline) are convenient but very expensive.

If you can fit backup data on DVDs of some kind, do it! They are cheap and uneraseable. If you treat them well, they'll treat you well. Don't put them back in the %*&#@ spindle or a stack each time, store them properly.

After working in IT for about 13 years, I continue to learn my own damn lesson from not relying on optical media. I continue to lose data on occasion.

Also, It seems like HD's are less reliable than they used to be. I have several HD's from the late 80's that still work, but I've had several (personal and corporate) drives die in the last few months with no warning whatsoever. Drive Savers and the like get very expensive after a while. Don't worry about the shelf life of DVDs. I have CD-r's and DVDs that are quite old and still work perfectly.

If you can leave your video on the tapes (if you use tape) after the computer indexes them, they will last quite a while.

SDLT, LTO, and AIT3 tapes are very nice, but the drives are very expensive. The media are pretty expensive as well.

I can't wait for HD-DVD or BluRay drives to become cheap! I could easily hold most of a project on one disc alone. What a difference that will be.:thumbsup:
 
Great topic.

I use to back-up video projects onto DVDs (still do sometimes). But now I just have an external USB drive that backs-up work/personal files.

As far as ACORN (the search engine Isara is building which crawls about 600,000 web pages per day). The database is becoming too big to back-up on one single harddrive so we're looking into a RAID setup. But I'm new to Linux (and I'm stupid) so it'll probably be a while.
 
Last year I bought a 500gb Western Digital NetCenter - a NAS drive that runs on the network independently of the computers. It came with EMC Retrospect which is a backup program that can be set to do pretty much whatever you want when it comes to backups. I run a daily standard progressive backup scheme on all my project files and important stuff and a monthly full backup of my system to full restore.

About three weeks ago we picked up a 500GB Western Digital MyBook (USB/FireWire external) which also comes with backup software that works pretty much the same way. The NetCenter has been discontinued and replaced by the NAS version of the MyBook.

I highly recommend getting a NAS drive for storage because it also works as a server if you have several computers and tons of files you don't know if you're ever going to use or not. It's also a lot more convenient than having hundreds of burnt DVDs lying around everywhere to keep track of.

mor10
 
I put my car into reverse and make sure I don't hit anything behind me.

Oh, backup data?! I use a large USB drive and update when I've made major changes. Thanks for reminding me.
 
We've got some very bright people on this board! I'm am now scheming on my perfect backup pipeline.
 
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