www.engadget.com/entry/1234000710036562
Peripherals Ask Engadget We heard plenty of woeful tales of data loss during our data disaster con test from a few weeks back, and for this weeks Ask Engadget reader Dan solicits some advice for how prevent disaster from happening in the firs t place: Ive been a reader of the site for a long time, so I dont know why I di dnt think to contact you when I first started thinking about this. I h ope one or many of the superior minds that reads Engadget might have al ready found a solution to the home backup problem I now have. other geeks) have a large amount of MP3s, videos, and photos of family and friends stored on their computers/phones/whatever. It wasnt until a couple of days ago that the implications of this hit me. Given how fragile data is, whats the best way to back it up? It now appears that budget, or badly made CD-R and DVD+-R wont last f orever, so long-term storage on that medium is out. What is the Engadget readerships take on disaster recovery?
Add your comments) Reader Comments 1 Posted Mar 17, 2005, 8:46 PM ET by Ricky I remeber first using audio tape for backup back in the commodore days. i just setup a mid tower with 5 removeble 525 tray with 5 60GB running on 600Mhz using RAID 5 a ll for lest then 300 buck.
RVin Anyone have any experience with the Mirra Personal Server? I'm looking into getting one myself and was wondering if anyone had any e xperiences with this backup device.
Magneto Optical disks have several GB of stora ge, and are supposed to last a long time. UDO disks have 30 GB of storag e, and have a gauranteed lifetime of 50 years, which make them the bette r choice. Use a Text to Voice Converter to "download" the data into the Parrot.
sebastien ME, I can afford to loose my mp3's videos and even my documents but loosi ng my emails form outlook every time my pc crashes or wont boot unless i re install windows sucks and that's were Gmail comes in, i have all my 4 email address forward my email to my gmail account. and for my music and videos and sensitive docs, i leave them on a seperat e partition or drive so that i can always recover them. My date differential takes about 15 minutes to xcopy every day or so.
Synthaxx R-or Or you could alsways hit Ebay for a used DLT drive (check for the ones wi th 35Gb native). They can be had pretty cheaply and the tapes will survive a lot of punish ment (fall from 2 stories apperantly wasn't a problem :). Ofcourse if you do get one, you need to make sure you have a SCSI card, a nd make sure you have enough space. However, if anyone has something that can store more information i'm all ears, 800Gb backups are a pain. I use a Firewire drive with my iMac and Retrospect to keep a clone of my main drive. Both protect you agains t disk failure, but RAID won't protect you from accidentally deleting fi les or corrupted files. And, if something goes wrong with your RAID (which has happened to m e on several servers), you're totally outta luck. So, here's may plan for my home office: Every Sunday, I use WinRAR to backup the files on my laptop to a 160GB ex ternal hard disk. Every night, I schedule Windows Backup to save System State and a differe ntial backup to the external hard disk. Windows Backup is quicker than W inRAR because it's not doing compression. My wife's laptop backs up across the wireless network to an internal hard disk on my home Web server. The Web server backs itself up from one internal disk to another every ni ght with Windows Backup and a scheduled SQL database dump. Every six months or so, I backup my imp ortant files to DVDs (it takes like 10 DVDs), and take them out to my in -law's house. So, I'm not totally out of luck if there's fire, theft, or natural disaster.
Posted Mar 17, 2005, 9:02 PM ET by bebopredux I have found through experience ( ie; heartbreak ) that multiple backup s olutions are what work best. I have an external hard drive along with 3 drives in my case. I have copies of that 110GB folder on one of the 180GB drives in my case and also on the external drive. Being totally a nal, I also have made MP3 DVD's for the entire collection as well. For important emails I just forward copies to one Gmail account ( out of 10 ) that I have just for that purpose.
Posted Mar 17, 2005, 9:03 PM ET by JayDox Anyone have any ideas about software that would allow me to build my own mirra like box? I like the functionality of it, but the price is redicul ous!
Posted Mar 17, 2005, 9:07 PM ET by Stu as, others have said, gmail is a great backup. I've created several accou nts each with specified types of files. Some people may say that you can 't store more than 10mb at a time on gmail, but this isn't true.
Posted Mar 17, 2005, 9:08 PM ET by Stu as, others have said, gmail is a great backup. I've created several accou nts each with specified types of files. Some people may say that you can 't store more than 10mb at a time on gmail, but this isn't true.
Posted Mar 17, 2005, 9:16 PM ET by FrankH Mirra Personal Server is the way to go. For about $300 you get a box with a 120 GB hard drive an d software that is effortless. It is easy to setup and once it is setup you NEVER have to do anything or worry about it again. I have never had a HD crash, but I have recovered files several times. For example, my Quicken database so mehow got partially corrupted so I just recovered versions from Mirra un til I found one that was OK. The Mirra box connects to your home network and all you do is indicate wh ich folders on which computers you want to backup and it does all the re st. I am not associated with Mirra in any way except as a happy customer of t heir products.
Posted Mar 17, 2005, 9:25 PM ET by ronin Buy an external USB drive case and a huge hard drive (120GB+) then back u p critical files to it on a regular basis. Not perfect but probably the most economical method for large (+40GB) amo unts of data and comes with the extra benefit of being portable. I use a external full size case to back up my desktop computer to a 120GB HD and a 35" case with a 60GB notebook drive for my laptop.
I have a mac, i was wondering what the best type of External HD i should get. i was looking at lacie, seagate, and western digital, but so far im heading for lacie.
Posted Mar 17, 2005, 9:36 PM ET by george of the jungle gym Use Norton Ghost to "xerox" your hard drive's contents over to another HD D But... Of course, it helps if you have a spare HDD of equal or greater capacity. But it'll cost a lot less $$$ than some of the previous suggestions I'v e seen here.
Jeff #14: Buy an internal drive and an external enclosure. As to the original question, the only real answer is a combination of str ategies. Ideally you want to have multiple backups on different mediums. Obviously this can be a real pain in the butt, but you can use tools li ke Nero to automate it (that's what I use; it'll do incremental backups and it works over a network). I back up to both DVD and to other hard dr ives, depending on what I'm backing up (stuff I use or change a lot I ju st have spanning multiple drives on different PC's; The easiest and cheapest thing to do is honestly just buy a second hard d rive and mirror your current one to it. just fire it up whenever you want to do a backup, then put it away. It is hi ghly unlikely that *both* your main drive *and* your backup drive would fail simultaneously, especially if you are not even running your backup drive at the time (it should be locked away in a closet or something). I t won't be susceptible to a bad power supply or a fall off a desk or any thing like that if it's not in the PC. If you still worry even after doing that, though, then yeah, just take yo ur most important files and also keep them on a DVD. None of this stuff is permanent, but backups by nature should not be perm anent - there's no point restoring your system or your files from a back up that's ten years old. Eventually you'll move on to something else (an other new hard drive, rewritable Blu-Ray or whatever), but that's just t he nature of backups. The point is to have something available that can restore your *current* system or files, not the system as you had it man y years ago.
Posted Mar 17...
|
http://csua.com/feed/